**1. Introduction**

Saccharides on the cell surfaces play important roles in the living systems. For example, it mediate the cell-cell adhesion, fertilization, protein transportation, infection of pathogens and cancer metastasis etc [1, 2]. The saccharide-protein interactions also involve the various biological events (Table 1). Actualy, the saccharides are the model compounds of some of the medicines like oseltamivir [3]. The interaction between galactose and asialoglycoprotein receptor is a possible mechanism for the hepatocyte-specific drug delivery systems [4]. Therefore, it has been pointed out that the saccharide-protein interaction can be utilized for the novel bio-functional mateials such as cell cultivation, medicine target, and drug deliver‐ ly systems.


**Table 1.** The saccharide recognition of proteins, cells and pathogens.

© 2013 Miura et al.; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2013 Miura et al.; licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The saccharide-protein interactions are also important in terms of protein analyses (pro‐ teome), because the interaction is important to clarify the biological function of proteins. [5] The saccharide immobilized substrates are investigated for the saccharide-microarray. In ad‐ dition, the saccharide-protein interactions is a potential markar of various diseases like in‐ fection of pathogens (e.g. viruses, bacteria, Cholera, and Shiga toxin) and cancer. Therefore, the saccharide-protein interactions are also utilized for the biosensor of diseases.

Saccharide conjugtes with peptides and proteins are appropriate structure for phamaceuti‐ cal substances because of the biocompatibility and the fine structures. The glycopeptides to‐ ward shiga toxins (toxins from *E.coli* O-157 and enterohemorrhagic *E.coli*), influenza virus

Molecular Recognition of Glycopolymer Interface

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/54156

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There have been various multivalent saccharide derivatives as we described in the above section. Glycopolymers have been reported to exhibit larger multivalent effect comparing to other multivalent saccharides, because glycopolymers form large multivalent cluster [16]. The glycopolymers are the interesting compounds with large molecular weights and diverse structures. The glycopolymers are prepared by saccharide addition to polymer via polymer reaction, or by polymerization of saccharide monomers. The technique of synthetic polymer enables the preparation of versatile biomaterials. Especially, living radical polymerization is applicable to various saccharide monomers and provides the facile strategy for functional

**Figure 2.** Chemical structure of monomers for glycopolymer preparation for (a) living radical polymerization, (b) ring-

opening metathesis polymerization and (c) polymerization with saccharide addition.

[14] and lectins [15] were reported.

**2.1. Glycopolymer**

material preparation [17].

In this chapter, we describe the materials with molecular recognition ability of sugars. Section 2 reviews the multivalent interaction between sugar and proteins. Section 3 presents the phisycal chemical properties of glycopolymers. Section 4 presents the graft of glycopolymers and the biomaterial fabrication. Section 5 presents the glycopolymer in‐ terface with dendrimer.
