Adhesion to carbohydrates presented on epithelial cell surfaces is often the first step in bacterial infection. The low efficacy of monovalent inhibitors can be circumvented, as in nature, by the presentation of multiple copies of the carbohydrate ligand. A great deal of attention therefore has been directed towards the synthesis of glycopolymers.[1,2]Although multivalent presentation of carbohydrates on a polymeric scaffold can lead to inhibitors with high affinity for the target lectin or bacterial toxin, they still have low specificity; most sugars will bind many different lectins.[1,2]To overcome this, it is important to exploit structural biology information and tools to explore the binding pocket of different lectins, to guide the synthesis of new glycopolymers/particles.Here we present two approaches to combatting bacterial infection. 1) Exploitation of a new tandem post-polymerization modification strategy to introduce lectin specificity via macromolecular engineering of the carbohydrate density, and glycopolymer chain length.[1] 2) Incorporation of multivalent carbohydrates onto goldnanoparticles to make new colourimetric sensors which can discriminate between pathogenic and non-pathogenic bacteria for point-of-care diagnostic applications.[3] [1] Richards, S-J.; Jones, M.W.; Hunaban, M.I.; Haddleton, D.M.; Gibson, M.I., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2012  , 51, 7812�7816.[2] Jones, M.W.; Otten, L.; S-J.; Richards, Lowery, R.; Phillips, D.J.; Haddleton, D.M.; Gibson, M.I., Chem. Sci., 2014 , DOI:10.1039/C3SC52982G[3] Richards, S-J.; Fullam, E.; Besra, G.S.; Gibson, M.I., J. Mater Chem. B., 2014  , 4, 1490-1498

Glycosylated nanomaterials: Detection and neutralization of pathogenic bacteria and toxins

248th National Meeting (2014)

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