Carbohydrates and glycoconjugates play a major role in key biological events such as cell-cell recognition, pathogenesis, and inflammation. [1,2] As a consequence, there is a need to understand the structural parameters governing the recognition of carbohydrates by their receptors. This knowledge will be of use for both fundamental research and potential applications in diagnostics or therapeutics. However, research in this field is slowed by the wide diversity of carbohydrate structures and by the minute amounts of materials available for experimentation. The design of sensitive and highthroughput technologies for the characterization of oligosaccharide/protein interactions [3] is therefore emerging as an attractive tool for chemists and biochemists. Available techniques such as isothermal calorimetry, enzyme-linked lectin assay, and even crystallographic studies provide data on carbohydrate/protein interactions, but they are often limited by the amount of available material.
Carbohydrate microarray technology [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] is a promising approach for probing carbohydrate/protein interactions, and it permits the simultaneous screening of a number of biological interactions with only minute amounts of material. A large family of carbohydrate derivatives has been designed for immobilization on surfaces by various means. [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] However, this technology has various limitations. Relative surface densities of bound ligands are often not assessed. A careful optimization of the orientation and the distance separating the carbohydrate probe from the surface is often required.