Materials that display multiple carbohydrate residues have gained much attention due to their potential to inhibit or modulate biological multivalent interactions. These materials can be grouped accordingly to the way they are prepared, as unimolecular or as self-assembled systems. Both systems take advantage of the fact that multivalent interactions have significantly higher binding affinity than the corresponding monovalent interactions. The self-assembled system is a more recent field of

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... arch compared to the unimolecular system. In this review, we describe current efforts to realize multivalent carbohydrate interactions from the perspective of synthetic self-assembled systems. We limit the scope to self-assembled systems that are stable, soluble in aqueous solution and morphologically discrete. We grouped them into two separate categories. In the first category carbohydrate ligands self-assemble onto a pre-organized nanostructure, and in the second carbohydrate-conjugated block molecules spontaneously assemble to construct morphologically distinct nanostructures. , where he is presently Professor of Chemistry. His current research interests include synthetic self-organizing molecules, controlled supramolecular architectures, and organic nanostructures with biological functions. partner. Numerous examples of biological multivalent interactions include antibody-antigen interaction, pathogen recognition of the host cell, ligand-receptor interactions on the cell surface, and a number of intracellular processes such as transcriptional regulation. Protein-protein, nucleic acid-protein, and carbohydrateprotein interactions are the most prevalent biological multivalent interactions. Among them, large proportions of currently discovered multivalent interactions are mediated by carbohydrateprotein interactions. 3-5 They achieve their specificity by exploring the wide structural diversity of carbohydrates. Carbohydrate molecules on the mammalian cell surface are the targets of many pathogenic viruses and bacteria in their initial cell recognition events. The pathogens utilize multivalent interactions for tight binding and specific recognition of the cells, which is then followed This journal is