The 593^rd meeting of the Sydney University Chemical Society will be held on Wednesday 13^th August in Le Fèvre Lecture Theatre 2 of the Chemistry Building on the campus of The University of Sydney. The speaker will be Professor Carolyn Bertozzi from University of California, Berkeley.

A major lesson from eukaryotic genome sequencing projects is that the absolute number of genes an organism's genome encodes is not the best parameter for defining complexity of function. It appears that the complex functions associated with human health and disease are determined by combinatorial expansion of genomic information in the form of posttranslational modifications. Of these, the most complex and ubiquitous is glycosylation, highlighting the importance of glycobiology in the postgenomic era. This presentation will focus on new chemical approaches for perturbing and studying oligosaccharide function within the context of the cell surface.