Automated oligosaccharide synthesis challenges

A number of challenges still remain before a flexible, high-yielding, and absolutely selective strategy for the synthesis of oligosaccharides on the solid support becomes available. Once these problems are solved, the construction of an automated oligosaccharide synthesizer will become feasible. 

While the path to enhancing automated synthesis is clear, a number of practical challenges remains. Given the recent success of synthetic methods, other bottlenecks have emerged. Notably, the purification of both fully protected and deprotected oligosaccharides is a laborious process. Improvements in currently available techniques are needed to allow for the expedient purification of synthetic material. More efficient methods for the analysis and sequencing of carbohydrates are of major importance. 

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