Capsular polysaccharides (CPSs) on the bacterial cell surface play an important role in many important biological processes and are also the major virulent factors for numerous bacteria. Typically, CPSs are strain-specific, thus they are frequently used as the molecular basis for defining different serotypes or serogroups of a bacterium. Moreover, CPSs are attractive targets for the development of antibacterial vaccines. Therefore, an in-depth and definite understanding of CPSs and their structures and structure-activity relationships should be important and useful. However, natural CPSs derived from bacteria are heterogeneous. To address the issue, our group has been focused on the chemical synthesis of CPS repeating units and their oligomers as CPS analogs that have well-defined structures. These synthetic molecules are useful for the development of glycoconjugate vaccines and other biological studies. The current talk will discuss about the various strategies developed for the efficient chemical synthesis of the CPS repeating units of several Group B Streptococcus (GBS) serotypes.

Chemical synthesis of homogeneous and structurally defined bacterial polysaccharide repeating units and their oligomers

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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