The Carbohydrates Gordon Research Conference (GRC) brings together a diverse group of scientists who work in the broad area of “glycoscience”, a term that encompases the fields of carbohydrate chemistry, carbohydrate biochemistry, and glycobiology. Compared to other meetings in the glycoscience area, the Carbohydrates GRC differs in that it does not focus on a single class of glycoconjugate nor principally on the biology of glycoconjugates. Instead, this meeting serves as a forum for the presentation and critical discussion of the newest ideas and emerging concepts in the entire glycoscience area, with a focus on the molecular aspects of carbohydrate-containing compounds and their interactions with other molecules. The specific aims of this meeting will be to:

1. Bring together established and young investigators, including students and postdoctoral scholars, who work on the chemistry and biochemistry of carbohydrates;
2. Present the current state of carbohydrate synthetic, computational, and analytical tools with an emphasis on illustrating their abilities and limitations through applied examples in areas such as the development of diagnostics, vaccines, and other therapeutics, as well as with cutting-edge examples from academia; and
3. Highlight emerging research areas and build interdisciplinary collaborations between synthetic chemists, analytical chemists, computational chemists, biologists, bioinformaticists, and chemical biologists to best tackle the obstacles to understanding the structure and functions of, and therapeutic and diagnostic interventions based on, carbohydrate interactions.