“…Multivalent protein-carbohydrate interactions generally rely on multiple points of recognition/binding to enhance the individual binding interaction between one carbohydrate and its receptor, which are typically weak interactions [ 1 ]. A variety of synthetic multivalent scaffolds including linear polymers [ 2 , 3 , 4 ], star [ 5 , 6 , 7 ] and hyperbranched [ 8 , 9 , 10 ] polymers, gold nanoparticles [ 11 , 12 , 13 ], dendrimers [ 14 ], proteins [ 15 ], beads [ 16 ] and surfaces [ 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 ] have been functionalized with carbohydrates and then applied to the study and the mediation of multivalent protein-carbohydrate interactions [ 21 ]. These carbohydrate functionalized scaffolds have been used to study biological processes such as oncologic cellular aggregation [ 22 ] viral cell attachment [ 15 , 23 ], bacterial recognition [ 24 ], and signal transduction [ 25 ].…”