Lectins, carbohydrate-immobilized surfaces

Recently, Vomholt et al. reported a cuvette-based SPR method for examining binding domains of lectins on carbohydrate-immobilized surfaces [19]. By taking advantage of the low sample volume required by their cuvette-based method. 

One of the first applications of CuAAC in carbohydrate chemistry was - beside the one in the seminal paper of Meldal - the immobilization of azide-substituted sugars on microtiter plates (Scheme 16.14).The surface-bound sugars such as 62 were screened with various lectins and conld be elongated by glycosyltransferase-catalyzed fucosylation. The technique was later on improved by incorporation of a cleavable disulfide bond in the linker allowing mass spectrometric characterization of the carbohydrate array. ... 

Rather than using a covalent reaction to immobilize the small molecule to a surface, a small molecule tagged with a tail having special physical properties could adhere to a surface by physiosorption. This was demonstrated for the preparation of carbohydrate arrays in microtiter plates where carbohydrate labeled at the anomeric position with saturated carbon chains between 13 and 15 carbons were retained on a hydrophobic surface and were resistant to aqueous washing. The viabihty of this immobihzation was demonstrated with the detection of several carbohydrate-lectin interactions [59]. Conversely, it was also shown that such lipophilic tails could be introduced via Huisgen cycloaddition [60]. 

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