Glycosyl phosphates have emerged as useful glycosyl donors for stereoselective glycosidic bond formation in the synthesis of oligosaccharides. In this account, we describe some of our work in developing and further expanding this methodology, particularly with the use of propane-1,3-diyl phosphate as the anomeric leaving group. We have studied the reactions of several glycosyl propane-1,3-diyl phosphates with or without C-2 participating groups with a range of glycosyl acceptors in the presence of trimethylsilyl triflate in either stoichiometric or catalytic amount, and demonstrated their application in the synthesis of several disaccharides and also the synthesis of some trisaccharides.Carbohydrate research has gone through a rapid phase of expansion during the last thirty years, not only because carbohydrates are being considered as extremely useful stereochemical building blocks for complex organic synthesis. 1,2 More importantly, apart from being an energy source in living systems, carbohydrates increasingly are being recognised as playing important roles in a variety of biological processes, such as signaling, cell-cell communication, molecular and cellular targeting. 3 It is the enormous advances in the latter that forms the basis of a new area of multidisciplinary research named glycobiology, which deals mainly with the nature and role of carbohydrates in biological events. In biological systems, although carbohydrates can exist as free monosaccharides and oligosaccharides, the majority are covalently attached to other non-carbohydrate biomolecules, such as proteins or lipids, to form what are called glycoconjugates that generally include glycoproteins, glycolipids and proteoglycans. The advancement of research in glycobiology has to a large extent depended on the technological progress in structural analysis of oligosaccharides in glycoconjugates. However, in order to study the biological functions of carbohydrates and to develop carbohydratebased therapeutic agents, sufficient quantities of pure oligosaccharides and glycoconjugates are often required, and some of these can only be accessed by chemical synthesis. Compared with proteins and nucleic acids, which have linear structures, the construction of oligosaccharides from the monomers is more complicated due to the number of hydroxyl groups available for linkage and also the creation of a-or b-glycosidic bond at the anomeric centre.Since the early glycosylation method reported by Koenigs and Knorr in 1901, 4 stereoselective formation of the glycoside linkage in oligosaccharide synthesis has remained an active area of research. Over the last century, research in glycosylation chemistry has resulted in a better understanding of the glycoside reaction and produced an array of glycosylation methods that generally catered for almost every type of glycosidic bond formation. 5 However, to date, there is still no generally applicable method for glycoside formation as in the case of peptide synthesis. Considering the complex stereoelectronic nature of carbohy...