Carbohydrate Libraries by the Random Glycosylation Approach

Glycoscience Laboratory, Mitsubishi Kasei Institute of Life Sciences, Machida-shi, Tokyo, Japan 

Department of Chemistry, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada 

Combinatorial chemistry has been used with great success to create libraries in the development of inhibitors in the field of peptide and nucleic acid recognition.5,6 The basic strategy of a library approach is to synthesize large sets of molecules at a time, even as complex mixtures, and then determine whether any of the compounds is inhibitory. The active compound must be subsequently identified. This strategy stands in contrast to the extremely laborious and expensive process of traditional medicinal chemistry, where individual molecules are carefully synthesized and evaluated. The 

There are, in principle, two possible approaches to create a library of molecules. One strategy is based on the synthesis of structurally defined molecules independent of the method of synthesis, while the other strategy relies on the creation of a mixture of compounds. The former strategy is more straightforward and seems to be less problematic to assay since only one molecule is involved in each assay. The advantage of the latter strategy, on the other hand, is the greater number of compounds that can be obtained in the same number of reactions. In the case of peptides for example, 

NHAc N-Acetylglucosamine NHAc N-Acetylgalactosamine OH AcHNjV HO/ Fucose COOH Oy -OH Glucuronic acid 

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