Emerging from its roots in classical carbohydrate chemistry and biochemistry, glycobiology has become a vibrant, expanding, and important extension of modern molecular biology. Over the years, many outstanding monographs and books have documented important advances in this area and summarized critical methods and concepts (see listing following this preface). These volumes continue to serve as excellent resources for those interested in glycobiology. Why then should one publish an additional book on the subject? Most of these prior volumes have been directed at the specialist, assuming a substantial level of technical sophistication and expertise and a working knowledge of the relevant jargon. We present here a book that seeks to fulfill a somewhat different need: to summarize the current state of the art for the expert and yet serve as a resource for the novice wishing to explore the essentials of glycobiology.

This book had its origins from some independent lines of effort. For several years, some of us have been teaching a short elective course in glycobiology for graduate students at the University of California, San Diego. With the recent arrival of additional faculty with expertise in this field, it was decided to present a more comprehensive course on the subject, to be supplemented by a course book that could be then converted into a formal text. Meanwhile, other experts elsewhere in the country had put forward independent proposals to fill the perceived need for a basic textbook in glycobiology. Following a discussion over a beer after a glycobiology conference, we decided to pool all our efforts in this direction.

Since a major goal was to produce a text that would be accessible to students and other trainees, we used the 1998 UCSD Spring Quarter Graduate Course in Glycobiology as the basis for creating the text. By recruiting several additional experts as lecturers, we could present a comprehensive course that covered most aspects of the field. Each lecturer was asked to provide handouts for the students that were essentially the first drafts of chapters for the book. In turn, each student was required to provide anonymous critiques of some chapters as a part of the course requirement. This approach ensured not only that the draft chapters were written early on, but also that they underwent in-depth evaluation by bright young minds with an expressed interest in the field. Additional rounds of internal review by the group of six editors served to produce what we hope will be a valuable resource not only for the expert in the field, but also for the novice who wants to learn about glycobiology. We have tried to be as accurate and up to date as possible and to present a balanced point of view on controversial subjects. Given the current breadth of knowledge, it was not possible to do full justice to all aspects of the field, nor to comprehensively reference the extensive literature that exists. The relative emphasis on vertebrate biology bespeaks the greater volume of information currently available in this area of glycobiology.

The Editors are indebted to many others who made this book possible. Besides the students who took the course for credit, several other trainees audited the course and provided very useful feedback. Although the editors wrote the majority of the chapters in the book, the efforts of the other lecturer/authors were crucial in assuring the depth of expertise needed to cover the field effectively. Special thanks are due to John Inglis and Kaaren Janssen at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press for realizing the potential of this book, and for putting up with our many demands and idiosyncrasies. We also thank the Press staff, Jan Argentine, Inez Sialiano, Mary Cozza, Denise Weiss, Dotty Brown, and Danny deBruin, who deserve much credit for keeping us on track and converting our efforts into an attractive product. Last but not least, we acknowledge our families, lab members, and administrative assistants who supported us through all of the hard work needed to create this text. It now remains for the reader to decide if we have achieved our goals in producing this book.