Automated carbohydrate synthesizer produces polysaccharides of record-breaking length

Bob Yirka is a research scientist at Phys.org.

A team of researchers have designed and built an automated synthesizer that can produce polysaccharides of record-breaking lengths. The group describes how they built their device in their paper. The News & Views piece was published in the same journal issue as the work by the team in China.

Carbohydrates are a source of energy and play a very important role in biology. They note that naturally occurringCarbohydrates are made up of mixture of Molecules, which makes them complex.

Well-defined Carbohydrates are prized. As they grow larger, it's difficult to synthesise them. An automated synthesizer is one of the ways that the researchers have created to speed up the process.

The team created a synthesizer that has three parts: a synthesiser, a system for monitoring progress, and software that controls the hardware. A lamp and heat controls are used to make the synthesizer work.

The system has an automated system for controlling the delivery of materials and an automated system to clean it. The synthesizer is able to control the flow of reagents into a container and manage the growth of monosaccharides. The monitoring system continuously watches the reactions that are happening to make sure they are done correctly.

According to Cheng and Wang, one of the advantages of using such a system is that it doesn't need to protect groups. Extra steps added to the process make it more complex.

The result is a better yield. The longest type of glycan synthesized to date was shown to be created by the device with 4,320 stereogenic centers. Some drugs that are already on the market are created by the team using their device.

More information: Wenlong Yao et al, Automated solution-phase multiplicative synthesis of complex glycans up to a 1,080-mer, Nature Synthesis (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s44160-022-00171-9

The machine assembly of carbohydrates with more than 1,000 sugar units was described in Nature.

Journal information: Nature Synthesis , Nature

There is a science network.