Easy Route To Sugar Building Blocks

Abstract

A new method easily yields sugar nucleoside diphosphates (sugar-NDPs), which are required starting materials for chemoenzymatic oligosaccharide synthesis. If the method proves applicable for a wide variety of sugars, it could ease oligosaccharide synthesis for drug discovery and biological studies. Oligo­saccharides, or glycans, play key biological roles in immunity, blood type, molecular recognition, and cell signaling. Postdoc Hidenori Tanaka, carbohydrate chemist Ole Hindsgaul, and coworkers at Carlsberg Laboratory, in Copenhagen, developed the technique and tested it on three sugars(Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., DOI: 10.1002/anie.201205433). Hindsgaul says he devised the route “to get people out of my hair, writing and asking if we can make this or that sugar-NDP for them.” Most methods for combining a sugar and a nucleotide into a sugar-NDP are difficult and inconvenient. They require anhydrous organic solvents, products must be isolated prior to further synthetic manipulation, protecting groups are often r...