Antimicrobial Carbohydrate-Based Macromolecules: Their Structures and Activities.

Emerging drug resistance is creating an urgent demand for new antimicrobial therapeutics. Besides the development of conventional antibiotics, antimicrobial agents with novel mechanisms have attracted great attention, such as antimicrobial peptides and polymers. Interactions between carbohydrates and proteins on microbes are believed to be the first step of pathogenesis. Thus, considerable efforts have been made on the development of carbohydrate-containing molecules in antimicrobial research. Recent progress of glycosylated macromolecules for antimicrobial applications has been discussed with an emphasis on synthetic glycosylated materials.