1 Introduction

In the earlier Royal Society of Chemistry book Analytical Ultracentrifugation in Biochemistry and Polymer Science, we reviewed the progress and potential of the ultracentrifuge for providing fundamental information about polysaccharides in what for many is their natural state in solution. ^[1] Our chapter was reinforced by contributions from Lavrenko and co-workers, ^[2] who looked in detail at the concentration dependence of the sedimentation coefficient of polysaccharides, Comper and Zamparo, ^[3] who reviewed the sedimentation analysis of proteoglycans, and Preston and Wik, ^[4] who examined the non-ideality behaviour of hyaluronan. Since the publication of that book, there has been the launch and establishment of the XL-I analytical ultracentrifuge with full on-line data automatic data capture analysis, concurrent with a general phasing out of the older MOM 2081, MSE Centriscan and Beckman Model E analytical ultracentrifuges, although the latter facilitated off-line automatic data capture and analysis. ^{[5] , [6]}

These developments have facilitated some major advances in software for analysis. Although the focus of these advances has been for the study of protein systems, they also, with some adjustment where appropriate, present possibilities for the study of polysaccharides and related glycopolymers. And alongside these developments in instrumentation and analysis software, there have been some important developments with related techniques such as size-exclusion chromatography and atomic force microscopy. This chapter reflects on these advances and considers how the new generation of analytical ultracentrifugation is contributing, where appropriate in combination with other techniques,...