ABSTRACT
Over the last 20 years, there has been an expanding interest in the production of polysaccharides produced extracellularly by microorganisms for food, pharmaceutical, and medical applications including vaccines (Jones, 2005; Freitas et al., 2011). The wide range of their usefulness derives from a great diversity of structural, conformational, and functional properties (Morris and Harding, 2009; Pereira et al., 2009; Freitas et al., 2011) even though they are built up from very similar building blocks: pyranose (sixmembered) or furanose („ve-membered) carbohydrate ring structures (Table 10.1).
