Chemical and enzymatic synthesis of glycopolymers

The development of efficient, fast, flexible and general synthetic routes to glycopolymers is an ongoing challenge and much progress has been made in recent years. Chemical coupling methods have become increasingly sophisticated to fine-tune reactivity of reagents by fortuitous choices of anomeric activating group and protecting groups. As a result, oligosaccharide synthesis has become more predictable and reliable even to the extent that first examples of saccharide library syntheses in solution and on the solid phase have been published. In biology, the repertoire of biocatalysts that can be used for glycoside synthesis is ever-increasing, and enzyme-catalysed glycosylation steps have been successfully incorporated into synthetic strategies.