Covalent glycan immobilization

Glycans immobilized covalently are stable under various conditions. These glycochips have been used for investigating glycan-protein interactions, HTS and lectin/glycoenzyme discovery. 

Covalently immobilized arrays are formatted by glycans with functionalized spacers that react with a complementary activated surface to form a covalent bond. Several different covalent interactions were reported to construct a specified glycan array. Amine chemistry and thiol chemistry are the two major methods to conjugate glycans to the reactive substrate in the array surface (Fig. 15.2). Thiol chemistry was first adapted by Injae Shin in 2002 to react with the maleimide functional group (Fig. 15.2a, b) [7,41 ]. Disulfide bond formation was then reported for the fabrication... 

Figure 2 Immobilization strategies, (a) A schematic representation of noncovalent adsorption. The lipid tail of a neo-glycolipid adheres to a hydrophobic surface via noncovalent interactions, (b) Strategies used for covalent immobilization of glycans.

General procedures to manufacture, application and management of microarrays have been described in section 14.3. Special concerns to prepare carbohydrate micioar-rays will be dealt with in this subsection. Two methods are used to immobilize glycans on the surface for the fabrication of glycochips (Feizi et al., 2003) noncovalent and covalent immobilization technologies. 

Non-covalent immobilization. Unmodified glycans of high molecular weight (Mr > 20kDa) can be inunobilized nonspecifically on nitrocellulose-coated... 

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