Abstract:
Glycopeptide-based polymers are a kind of biodegradable polymers composed of polypeptides and carbohydrates. Owing to their chemical similarity to natural glycopeptides and glycoproteins, they can mimic the structure and function of natural products. There are two main types of glycosides:
N-glycosides and
O-glycosides. Glycosides are coupled with amino acids in advance to form glycosylated amino acid building blocks, and then participate in the synthesis of glycopeptides together with amino acids in solid phase synthesis. Native chemical ligation is often used to synthesize longer glycopeptide that cannot be obtained by solid phase synthesis. Glycopeptides are designed to reflect multivalence, so the most common types include branched glycopeptides, self-assembled glycopeptides and polymer glycopeptides. Branched glycopeptides mainly include glycopeptide dendrimers. Self-assembled glycopeptides mainly consist of modifying various glycosyl groups on self-assembled polypeptides. Based on these self-assembled glycopeptides, glycopeptide materials can self-assemble into various nanostructures, such as micelles, vesicles, fibers and nanorods. As a kind of structural mimic of natural glycoproteins, synthetic glycopeptides can play a variety of biomedical roles. Synthetic glycopeptides are capable of binding to lectin or adhesive of bacteria or targeting intracellular bacteria of macrophages. Due to the overexpression of carbohydrate-binding proteins on tumor cells surfaces, glycopeptides have been widely investigated as an anti-tumor vaccine. In addition, glycopeptide-based hydrogels can be used as a biomimetic scaffold for mammalian cells growth due to their high-water content and similar structure, shape and composition to the extracellular matrix (ECM) in tissues. Glycopeptides can also simulate natural glycosaminoglycans to play a role in tissue and cartilage repair. We summarize the synthesis method, material design and biomedicine application of glycopeptides, focusing on the material design of glycopeptides in branched glycopeptides, self-assembled glycopeptides and polymer glycopeptides, and the applications of glycopeptides in antibacterial, anti-tumor vaccine, bionic scaffold, tissue and cartilage repair.