Production and application of glycan microarrays

Glycans are vital elements of living organisms and are involved in recognition, communication, cell growth and development, motility, and other significant processes. The interactions of glycans with the proteins that bind them provide valuable information about protein interaction and specificity. By printing glycans on microarrays, investigators are able to effectively determine the binding specificity of certain proteins with an extremely efficient and precise result. Such chips are performed by standard robotic microarray printing. Incubating the slides with various GBP-containing substances not only reveals clear receptor preferences of the proteins, but also detects minute differences in structure specificity.