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Abstract

The plant cell wall provides the richest available resource of fermentable carbohydrates and bio-based materials. The main component of plant cell walls is cellulose, the most abundant biomolecule on earth. Besides cellulose, which is constructed from relatively simple ?-1,4-glucan chains, plant cell walls also contain the structurally more complex heteropolysaccharides hemicellulose and pectin, as well as lignin and cell wall proteins. A detailed understanding of the molecular structures, functions, and biosyntheses of cell wall components is required to further promote their industrial use. Plant cell wall research is to a large part hampered by a lack of available well-defined oligosaccharide samples representing the structural features of cell wall glycans. One technique to access these oligosaccharides is automated glycan assembly, a technique in which monosaccharide building blocks are, similarly to automated peptide and oligonucleotide chemistry, successively added to a linker-functionalized resin in a fully automated manner. This concept article covers recent research from our laboratory on the automated glycan assembly of different classes of cell wall glycans that were used as molecular tools for cell wall biology. More than 60 synthetic oligosaccharides were prepared and printed as microarrays for screening monoclonal antibodies that recognize plant cell wall polysaccharides. The synthesized oligosaccharides have also been used to investigate glycosyltransferases and glycosyl hydrolases, which are involved in synthesis and degradation of plant cell walls, as well as for the analysis of cell wall remodeling enzymes.