Glycoside hydrolysis catalysis

D. Piszkiewicz and T. C. Bruise, Glycoside hydrolysis. I. Acetamido and hydroxyl group catalysis in glycoside hydrolysis, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 89 (1967) 6237-6243. 

Intermolecular General Acid Catalysis of Glycoside Hydrolysis... 

Electrophilic catalysis of the departure of halogens in the century-old Koenigs-Knorr reaction is implicit in the use of heavy metal bases such as silver oxide and mercuric cyanide, but the first demonstration of electrophilic catalysis in water (in the hydrolysis of the p-glucoside of 8-hydroxyquinoline by first-row transition metals (Cu Np > C")) was by Clark and Hay in 1973. The observations were expanded to the more conveniently followed (because more labile) benzaldehyde methylacetals or tetrahydropyranyl derivatives of 8-hydroxyquinoline, whose hydrolysis is now known to give solvent-equilibrated oxocarbenium ions (Figure 3.19). Surprisingly, however, the observation of electrophilic catalysis of glycoside hydrolysis itself was not picked up by paper... 

Fig. 1 Simultaneous general acid and general base catalysis of glycoside hydrolysis.

Because of its importance to carbohydrate technology, biochemistry, and physical organic chemistry, the hydrolytic cleavage of glycosides has been extensively studied with respect to both acid and enzymic catalysis. Reviews on the acid-catalyzed hydrolysis have been presented by BeMiller, Capon, ... 

At the time the mechanism shown in [60] was proposed it was not known whether it was even chemically reasonable. Bimolecular general acid catalysis involving proton transfer in the transition state [equation (45)] had never been observed in the hydrolysis of glycosides or simple acetals. Bronsted and Wynne-Jones (1929) had... 

One result from the analysis of the MD simulation was the proposal of a new enzymic pathway for hydrolysis by lysozyme. We begin with a description of the alternative mechanism, and the basis on which it was proposed. The energetics of the individual GlcNAc units in the lysozyme cleft are then presented, followed by a graphical representation of the correlation between the atomic fluctuations of the substrate and those of the enzyme. Of particular interest is the fact that the binding interactions stabilize a bound state conformation for the two glycosides involved in hydrolysis that is optimum for catalysis by the alternative mechanism and which differs from the conformations of the other glycosides. These conformational features are described in the final two sections. 

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