Hydrodynamic Modeling of Carbohydrate Polymers

Polysaccharides, mucins, and other large molecular weight glycoconjugates tend to exhibit quite different hydrodynamic properties compared with proteins. This is not only because of their general larger size (reaching to molar masses >50 × 106 g/mol) for some polysaccharides like amylopectin, their greater non-ideality (through molecular co-exclusion and charge effects – as represented by virial coefficients), and greater diversity of shapes and flexibilities. The primary structure of carbohydrate polymers is not coded by a genetic template; so they are also polydisperse (as represented by their molecular weight distribution or composition distribution). Nucleic acids are also a class of glycoconjugate (poly-deoxyribose or poly-ribose backbones linked by phosphor-diester instead of glycosidic bonds).

This means that compared with proteins, the grammar of enquiry is somewhat different: We can use hydrodynamic methods to ascertain the...