Recent advances in the preparation of glycopolymer bioconjugates

The significant progress made in understanding the role of carbohydrates and carbohydrates based therapeutics at molecular level has highlighted the importance of carbohydrate bioconjugates in the field of biology, chemistry and therapeutics. The glycosylation of biomolecules is a nature-inspired approach, to impart structural and functional properties to the biomolecules. The availability of facile techniques to synthesize well-defined glycopolymers of varying molecular weights, compositions and shape and their facile conjugation with biomolecules of interest have helped researchers in understanding many aspects of their biological functions at the molecular level. This review focuses on the development of glycopolymer-bioconjugates and provides a comprehensive overview of the present bioconjugation tools for their synthesis. The glycosylation of biomolecules is achieved by either pre or post-polymerization modification approaches. The review high-lights the potential of living radical polymerization for the facile synthesis of glycopolymer bioconjugates using both pre and post-polymerization bioconjugation approaches, and without disrupting the native structure and functions of the biological molecules. Non-covalent carbohydrate-carbohydrate and carbohydrate-protein interactions play a significant role in many biological and pathological events. The non-covalent interactions of synthetic glycopolymers with biomolecules are also discussed in this review. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.