Synthesis of carbohydrates for applications in glycobiology

The current status of synthetic carbohydrate chemistry for the provision of biologically active oligosaccharides is summarized. Examples are given to demonstrate that synthetic strategy and methodology are now sufficiently developed that carbohydrate chains containing 2-6 sugar residues can be synthesized with reasonable predictability. Such syntheses, however, remain extremely laborious, taking on average 7 weeks per monosaccharide residue for a trained individual to complete. The use of glycosyltransferases can dramatically speed up this process for the provision of small (mg) quantities of test compounds. It is proposed, and supported by examples, that the most rapid and efficient manner of preparing such quantities may be to chemically synthesize small di- or trisaccharide primers and elaborate these to the required complex oligosaccharides enzymatically.