A N having a molecular weight of approximately 18000, results in the structure of this glycoprotein. The glycosylation of this glycoprotein is responsible for an extended conformation of the peptide backbone. There are a number of highly charged polysaccharides in nature that exhibit biological functions like heparin or chondroitin sulfate. We synthesized disaccharides that show the same sulfation pattern as the natural carbohydrates from the disaccharides carried between one and three charged groups. Conformational analysis by NMR shows that the charged groups in the disaccharides can exhibit attractive as well as repulsive interactions.
Attractive interactions can occur when a cation is complexed by the negatively changed groups.
If no coordination of a cation is possible, one observes repulsive interactions. Another branch of the group focusses on the use of artificial neural networks for recognition of patterns in various types of spectra like NMR, mass spectra and infrared spectra. Currently we are trying to implement this procedure for oligosaccharides that occur as sidechains of glycoproteins. By training neural networks to be tolerant to spectral noise, we managed to increase the effective sensitivity of the NMR procedure by a factor of 25. We showed that artifical neural networks can be used to predict the physical properties of a chemical compound, e.g. liquid crystalline molecules, from their chemical structure.