Abstract
Recent developments in the synthesis of polysaccharides and their applications are reviewed. Synthetic polysaccharides can be obtained by stepwise coupling, polycondensation, ring-opening polymerization, and orthoester method. Recently, the ring-opeing polymerization of anhydro sugars produced a lot of stereoregular, linear polysaccharides such as 1, 6-glucan (dextran), 1, 6-mannan, 1, 6-galactan, 1, 4-ribopyranan, 5, 6-glucan, and 3, 5-xylofuranan. One of the next targets is to synthesize stereoregular, branched polysaccharides which are thought to have a certain kind of biological functions. Carbohydrate -protein interaction, enzyme action, and immunological function are taken as examples for medical applications of synthetic, linear dextran and mannan.
