Chemoenzymatic synthesis: application to the study of carbohydrate recognition.

Reported here are useful strategies recently developed for the large-scale synthesis of complex and polyfunctional molecules using native or engineered enzymes as catalysts. Several important issues in the field regarding the problems of substrate specificity, product inhibition, reaction reversibility, enzyme stability and catalytic efficiency are addressed in the representative synthesis of carbohydrates and carbohydrate mimetics designed for use to study carbohydrate-mediated cell adhesion.