Themed collection Exploring multivalent carbohydrate-protein interactions with chemical ligations

Glycan microarrays provide a high-throughput platform to rapidly interrogate serum anti-glycan antibodies, identify new biomarkers for a variety of conditions, and analyze the immune system's response to vaccines and other treatments.

Carbohydrates are essential mediators of many processes in health and disease. The development of glycomimetics as inhibitors and modulators of their lectin receptors has been a success story with numerous molecules reaching clinical stages.

This review highlights the recent development in the use of carriers of increasing simplicities and versatile chemical ligation processes leading to synthetic vaccine candidates against tumor-associated carbohydrate antigens (TACAs).

Glycomacromolecules show significant potential as antimicrobials. We highlight recent studies on their performance in hindering host cell entry and biofilm formation, and their potential as drug delivery and diagnostic agents.

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) has been widely employed to assess diverse features of glycan–protein molecular recognition events.

This review traces the development of targeted delivery of nucleic acids to liver cells using multivalent carbohydrate ligands.

This review summarises major contributions based on carbohydrate multivalent systems to study their interaction with human lectins.

Metabolic glycoengineering in combination with bioorthogonal chemistry provides a means to study and exploit the biological functions of glycans.

This review highlights the recent achievements in the field of carbon-based multivalent glyco-nanoplatforms with biological applications.

In this review, we describe the conjugation methods used to construct multivalent glycocyclopeptides and their utilization for applications in glycoscience.

This article summarizes the preparation of glycan probes, the construction of glycan microarrays and their applications for biological and biomedical research.

Understanding lectin–ligand interaction inspires synthesis of glycomimetic and glycocluster ligands for applications.

This review describes the design and preparation of peptide mimotopes, their structural and functional mimicry properties, and their advantages over that of glycan ligands in developing a therapeutic strategy to treat glycan-related diseases.