Oligosaccharide microarrays fabricated on aminooxyacetyl functionalized glass surface for characterization of carbohydrate–protein interaction

Carbohydrate–protein interactions play important biological roles in biological processes. But there is a lack of high-throughput methods to elucidate recognition events between carbohydrates and proteins. This paper reported a convenient and efficient method for preparing oligosaccharide microarrays, wherein the underivatized oligosaccharide probes were efficiently immobilized on aminooxyacetyl functionalized glass surface by formation of oxime bonding with the carbonyl group at the reducing end of the suitable carbohydrates via irreversible condensation. Prototypes of carbohydrate microarrays containing 10 oligosaccharides were fabricated on aminooxyacetyl functionalized glass by robotic arrayer. Utilization of the prepared carbohydrate microarrays for the characterization of carbohydrate–protein interaction reveals that carbohydrates with different structural features selectively bound to the corresponding lectins with relative binding affinities that correlated with those obtained from solution-based assays. The limit of detection (LOD) for lectin ConA on the fabricated carbohydrate microarrays was determined to be ∼0.008 μg/mL. Inhibition experiment with soluble carbohydrates also demonstrated that the binding affinities of lectins to different carbohydrates could be analyzed quantitatively by determining IC50 values of the soluble carbohydrates with the carbohydrate microarrays. This work provides a simple procedure to prepare carbohydrate microarray for high-throughput parallel characterization of carbohydrate–protein interaction.