Oligosaccharides structural analysis methods

At that time the synthesis of a disaccharide was considered a major undertaking, and preparation of the more elaborate oligosaccharides must have appeared as an unrealistic project. The successful completion of such a program required, at a minimum, the development of new glycosylation methods, especially for the synthesis of the a-glycosidic linkage, and the development of new methods for the structural analysis of both protected oligosaccharide intermediates and of the final synthetic products. 

The full structural determination of the structure of an oligosaccharide by this method includes complete sequencing by successive enzymatic digests using specific exoglycosi-dases and analysis of the products of each hydrolysis by mass spectrometry to observe the effectiveness of the hydrolysis by the decrease of molecular weight. [249]... 

This and similar methods have been used to identify a number of oligosaccharides from natural sources [2,334]. One example of some clinical interest is the structural analysis of a-D-mannopyranoside-(l 3)-/3-D-mannopyranoside-(l ->4)-a-acetamido-a-deoxy-D-glucose in the urine from patients with a lysosomal storage disease, mannosidosis [335]. 

R406 M. Kitagawa, K. Yamashina, S. Tojyo and D. Ulam-Orgikh, In Search for Molecules which Calculate Quantum Mechanically , Mem. Inst. Sci. Ind. Res., Osaka Univ., 2000, 57, 96 R407 A. Klein, G. Strecker, G. Lamblin and P. Roussel, Structural Analysis of Mucin - Type O - Linked Oligosaccharides , Methods Mol. Biol. (Totowa, N.J.), 2000,125,191... 

Since the last review in this Series on the subject of oligosaccharides as such, a vast amount of literature on its various aspects has been published, and many new compounds have been isolated. The aim of the present article is to consider one aspect of oligosaccharide chemistry, the determination of structure, and to provide up-to-date Tables of the oligosaccharides which have been isolated and characterized. As a comprehensive account of all of the methods used for structural analysis is obviously impossible in the space available, the authors have concentrated on those methods, developed in the past ten years, which require only small amounts of oligosaccharide. 

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