New fabrication and applications of carbohydrate arrays.

Carbohydrate arrays are used as high-throughput screening platforms to study the carbohydrate-mediated recognition events for glycobiology. The polysaccharide arrays are easy to fabricate by non-covalently or covalently immobilizing polysaccharides onto array surfaces because polysaccharides have hydrophobic interactions. Oligosaccharides must be derived and covalently or non-covalently immobilized onto array surfaces to fabricate oligosaccharide arrays because they have hydrophilic interactions. At the moment, carbohydrate arrays are mainly used to study the carbohydrate-protein interactions and carbohydrate-binding lectins or antibodies, which are possible to be applied to clinics and diagnoses. This review mainly summed up the new fabrication strategies of carbohydrate arrays and their applications in recent four years.