ABSTRACT
The past two decades have seen intensive research into the biological roles of oligosaccharides, and it is now clear that the multitude of chiral centers give rise to an array of structural variations that endow oligosaccharides with enormous potential for encoding biological information. Oligosaccharides are now known to be involved in functions ranging from cell-cell recognition to viral and bacterial adhesion [I]. Investigation of their biological roles requires the availability of synthetic oligosaccharides or analogues thereof;
hence, it is not coincidental that there has been a parallel explosive growth in oligosaccharide synthetic methods [2].
