Item

Abstract

Polysaccharides from plant biomass are explored extensively as renewable resources for the production of materials and fuels. However, the heterogeneous nature of non-cellulosic polysaccharides such as arabinoxylan makes it difficult to correlate molecular structure with macroscopic properties. To study the impact of specific structural features of the polysaccharides on e.g. crystallinity or affinity to other cell wall components, collections of polysaccharides with defined repeating units are required. Herein, a chemo-enzymatic approach towards artificial arabinoxylan polysaccharides with systematically altered branching patterns is described. The polysaccharides were obtained by glycosynthasecatalyzed polymerization of glycosyl fluorides derived from arabinoxylan oligosaccharides that were procured either chemically, chemo-enzymatically, or from a commercial source. X-ray diffraction and adsorption experiments on cellulosic surfaces revealed that the physico-chemical properties of the synthetic polysaccharides strongly depend on the specific nature of their substitution patterns. The presented strategy of combining sophisticated carbohydrate synthesis with glycosynthase technology offers access to artificial polysaccharides for structure-property relationship studies that are not accessible by other means.