How It's Made - derivatized carbohydrates

I've been wanting to do a drawing like this for a long time, and finally a project came along that was perfect for it. It's for cover art, so I can use quite a bit of artistic license, and the article it highlights is about metabolic engineering, or hijacking a biosynthetic assembly line to put a modified sugar on the cell surface. I left off some details on the rough sketch here since it's not published yet, but I'll post the final image when it is. The plan is for this drawing to be done in white and overlaid on top of a sweet image of a glowing zebrafish head from the paper.  As a side note, I watched some clips of "How It's Made" for a bit of inspiration. We love that show around here.