The focus of this thesis is to examine the structural properties of polysaccharides produced by bacteria, as well as the dynamic and conformational behavior of a synthetically derived oligosaccharide.

The primary structures of the O-polysaccharide repeating units of four different Escherichia coli (E. coli) strains, namely O175, O177, O103 and TD2158, as well as the first report of a capsular polysaccharide produced by lactic acid bacteria Leuconostoc mesenteroides ssp. cremoris PIA2 are reported in paper I–V. Structural analyses have been performed using a combination of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and chemical component analysis.

The elucidated structures in paper I–III, as well as paper V, are composed of linear repeating units of varying composition and length. In paper IV, the structure of the O-polysaccharide repeating unit of E. coli TD2158 is determined to be a branched hexasaccharide structure with a heterogeneous substitution pattern, with either a β-GlcpNAc or β-Glcp residue branching to the backbone chain. Incubation with bacteriophage HK620 tailspike protein shows that the polysaccharide is selectively cleaved at the α-GlcpNAc-(1→2)-α-Rhap-linkage of the backbone chain, yielding a 9:1 ratio of β-GlcpNAc/β-Glcp containing hexasaccharides after digestion.

In paper VI the conformational properties of a trisaccharide, which constitutes an internal epitope of the Le^aLe^x hexasaccharide over-expressed on the surface of squamous lung cancer cells, have been analyzed using NMR spectroscopy and molecular dynamics simulations. The β-(1→3)-linkage of the trisaccharide was shown to be highly flexible.