Sweet building blocks for selfassembling biomaterials with molecular recognition

Abstract

After billions of years of evolution not a single live cell has emerged that does not cover itself with a dense code of glycans: carbohydrates are involved in all essential processes within the life cycle of cells and organisms. They exercise their bioactivities via simultaneous multivalent non-covalent interactions with other biomolecules such as proteins. Supramolecular polymers are ideal systems to generate polyvalent architectures for studying and modulating these interactions: the inherent reversibility of the self-assembling process and the translation of monomers into polymers provides control over ligand density and assembly architecture. We present briefly some recent approaches to develop such systems and to use them in different biomedical applications.