An Improved Protocol for the Synthesis and Purification of Yariv Reagents

Yariv reagents are widely used tools to study plant proteoglycans known as the Arabinogalactan proteins (AGPs). Despite widespread use of the Yariv reagent in the study of AGPs and several reports of synthetic protocols, there remains a lack of a simple procedure to obtain pure Yariv reagents. We report our optimized protocols to address the purification issues faced upon synthesis of Yariv reagents. Additionally, we report challenges that make characterization difficult such as peak broadening in NMR due to Yariv-water interactions. We also show ways of processing Yariv reagents to overcome the characterization issues caused by peak broadening.