Seminar

Sugars: more than just food

Prof. Gideon Davies

Gideon Davies received his PhD from the University of Bristol in 1990, and went on to postdoctoral research at EMBL Hamburg and CNRS Grenoble. In 1996 he received a Royal Society University Research Fellowship to work on Carbohydrate-Active Enzymes. He was made a Professor of the University of York in 2001.  He has won many awards including the 2015 Davy Medal of the Royal Society, the 2014 Khorana Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the 2010 Gabor Medal of the Royal Society. Gideon was elected a a Fellow of The Royal Society in 2010, and as a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization the same year.  He was also elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2014. Sugars: such a small word, but such a vast array of molecules and functions.  Sugars are not just the simple white chemicals we use to sweeten tea and coffee!   Structural sugars are what keeps cells intact, makes trees tall and lobster shells hard.  Complex sugars are the language of your cells, the way our body communicates with itself and with friends and foes. Sugars are how pandemic flu enters your body & how nasty bacteria hide from your immune system.  But they are also the basis for new generations of medicines to fight bacteria, viruses, and cancer, perhaps even neurodegeneration.  The health of your "good bacteria" in the intestines demands they are fed the correct sugars in their diet.  In this lecture I shall discuss the many surprising roles for sugars in our everyday lives. Sugars are more than just food.