Carbohydrates, mesomorphism

Carbohydrates are natural compounds which have hydroxyl groups capable of hydrogen bonding. Amphiphilic sugars with long alkyl chains form layered or columnar mesomorphic structures due to microphase segregation, as shown in Fig. 1 (Type A-I-c) [17-20, 149-153]. Alkylglucosides are representative... 

In order to investigate the influence of the position of the alkoxy chain at the hydrophilic headgroup on the mesomorphic properties of such monotailed carbohydrate liquid crystals, two research groups systematically varied the structure of two series of model compounds (16 and 17) [9, 101]. 

Studies of the mesomorphic properties of 4-alkoxyphenyl-]3-D-glucopyranosides [102 b] reveal that these amphiphiles form a SmA phase on heating. Lyotropically, the usual phase sequence for single tailed carbohydrates (isotropic, columnar hexagonal, cubic, and lamellar with decreasing water... 

The first class of mesomorphic copolymers that we have synthesized and studied are copolymers with a hydrophilic saccharide block and a hydrophobic peptide block. In these copolymers, the saccharide block is a carbohydrate fraction of a glycoprotein. A glycoprotein can be described as a graft copolymer in which a small number of carbohydrate chains are grafted to a peptide skeleton. 

Latex particles bearing carbohydrate species were prepared by emulsion copolymerisation of styrene or methyl methacrylate with polymerisable liposacchaiide surfactants. Surface active and mesomorphic properties are discussed. Data are given concerning the adsorption of bovine serum albumin and the covalent binding of antibodies and singlestrand DNA fragments on their surface. 27 refs. 

In the field of natural products, there is growing interest in the increasing range of carbohydrates that are being found to be liquid crystalline [78-80], swinging interest back to the role of liquid crystals in biological systems, where recent studies of lyotropic mesomorphism in deoxyguanosine... 

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