Whenever medical artists draw a cell in close-up they'll make a cell membrane, convert it to lipids, populate it with cell surface receptors, and call it a day. We're often guilty of this ourselves! But as with so many things in biology, the reality is a lot more complex. Cells are covered in a dense forest of sugars called the glycocalyx. It's deeply under-studied, and under-utilised from a therapeutic perspective, which is why the SynBIOcarb Consortium are focussing their synthetic glycobiology investigations on the glycocalyx, and how it can be used to formulate new therapeutic interventions.