The Literature of Carbohydrate Chemistry

An Advances in Carbohydrate Chemistry series was started in 1945 (volume 1), with a new volume appearing every year. In 1969, the name was changed to Advances in Carbohydrate Chemistry and Biochemistry, The series continues today and is a compendium of detailed reviews, four to five per volume, of carbohydrate subjects and authored by experts knowledgeable in the subjects. The work reflects the knowledge of the time and usually includes background and history, often including a biography of individual(s) that contributed a lifetime to the study of carbohydrates. 

With the expansion of scientific studies, which included carbohydrates, in the middle of the twentieth century, two important works on carbohydrates appeared. The first was a methods series, Methods in Carbohydrate Chemistry, Volume 1 appeared in 1962, and other volumes followed after that. It provided detailed procedures for the isolation, analysis, and synthesis of carbohydrates. Again, each chapter or section was authored by an expert that was actively working in the field and knew the important details that were necessary for successfully carrying out the described procedures. To date, there are nine volumes published in various years. The principal editor has been Roy Whistler of Purdue University. The volumes, titles, year of publication, and editors are the following  

About the same time, a new international research journal, Carbohydrate Research, appeared (volume 1) in 1964. It has become the principal journal for the publication of all aspects of carbohydrate research, such as chemical synthesis and modification enzymatic synthesis organic and enzymatic mechanisms involving carbohydrates carbohydrate metabolism conformational analysis isolation of carbohydrates from natural sources analytical methods chemistry of monosaccharides, oligosaccharides, and polysaccharides biological function of carbohydrates and physical properties. Approximately four to five volumes are published each year. 

A more recent international journal. Journal of Carbohydrate Chemistry, was introduced in 1982. It requires camera-ready copy and is devoted primarily to the organic and physical chemistry of carbohydrates, such as novel synthetic methods mechanisms involved in carbohydrate reactions uses of carbohydrates in the synthesis of natural products, drugs, and antibiotics use of carbohydrates as synthetic reagents separation methods as applied to carbohydrate reactions and synthesis spectroscopic and crystallographic structure studies of carbohydrates molecular modeling studies and the chemistry of carbohydrate polymers, oligosaccharides, polysaccharides, and glycoconjugates. 

About the same time (1981), another international journal. Carbohydrate Polymers, was introduced. Its emphasis is on technical aspects of industrially important polysaccharides. It covers the study and uses of industrial applications of carbohydrate polymers in foods, textiles, paper, wood, adhesives, and pharmaceuticals and includes topics concerning structure and properties biological and industrial development analytical methods chemical, microbiological, and enzymatic modifications and interactions with other materials. 

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Work in the laboratory was Dr. Thompson s first love, but he had an excellent command of the literature of carbohydrate chemistry, together with a flair for direct, concise scientific writing, which he used when he could be induced to leave the laboratory. With M. L. Wolfrom, he wrote a number of book chapters, notably those on esters and glycosides in the second edition of Pigman s book. His contributions to the series Methods in Carbohydrate Chemistry were particularly prolific. Most of these procedures were developed from his own laboratory work, and were written shortly before his death. 

In recent years, it has become fashionable to determine the composition of honey, and in the current literature are many reports dealing with the compositional aspects of honey from various parts of the world.65-73 It is, however, regrettable that application of paper chromatography, which has played an outstanding role in the development of carbohydrate chemistry, has not yet been fully explored in... 

Dr. Mills felt that he was tilling fertile ground, and he searched the carbohydrate literature for further examples. The result of this work was his article on The Stereochemistry of Cyclic Derivatives of Carbohydrates [This Series, 10,1-53 (1955)]. He had found his field. In the Introduction thereto he described his views on carbohydrate chemistry thus The writer, whose interests have lain mainly in the alicyclic field, has been greatly impressed by the scope that carbohydrate chemistry offers for elaborating and testing stereochemical hypotheses. Carbohydrates possess the desirable features of optical activity, crystallinity, and availability, and display a diversity in structural types and reactions that cannot be matched in other fields. . . Important contributions have, of course, already come from this source, but usually as by-products of the development of carbohydrate chemistry, rather than through the deliberate choice of carbohydrate compounds as models for experimental study. ... 

While further examples of these reactions are not presented here, these reactions (among others) were extensively cataloged by Larock [32] with respect to general organic chemistry. As such, it is important to note that while the literature may not frequently present these reactions in the context of carbohydrate chemistry, they are nonetheless extremely valuable tools for the introduction of halides to sugar ring systems. 

Glyceraldehyde is a common name the lUPAC name for this monosaccharide is 2,3-dihydroxypropanal. Similarly, dihydroxyacetone is a common name its lUPAC name is 1,3-dihydroxypropanone. The common names for these and other monosaccharides, however, are so firmly rooted in the literature of organic chemistry and biochemistry that they are used almost exclusively to refer to these compounds. Therefore, throughout our discussions of the chemistry and biochemistry of carbohydrates, we use the names most common in the literature of chemistry and biochemistry. 

The book has been written for students beginning the study of carbohydrate chemistry who have some background in organic chemistry. It should also have appeal to those wanting a review of carbohydrate chemistry from either an elementary or an advanced level, and the many structures, literature citations, and suggestions for further study should serve as a helpful reference. 

Several improvements of the process, such as the reaction with acyl chlorides or the application of two-phase reaction systems with propylene glycol and an emulsifier in order to build a microemulsion, have been described in the literature and patents [21]. Another approach for the synthesis of sugar esters is the use of enzymes. Enzymatic catalysis in the field of carbohydrate chemistry has been actively explored over years in laboratory... 

A review of cycloaddition reactions in carbohydrate chemistry is presented. The use of carbohydrate-derived dienes and dienophiles in the Diels-Alder reaction, hetero-Diels-Alder and dipolar addition reactions of carbohydrates are described. Stereochemical aspects of the cycloaddition processes are also discussed, and applications to the synthesis of natural products are included for each reaction type. Much of the material presented has appeared in the literature within the past five years however, earlier studies are also included in order to give a more representative historical perspective. 

The relatively scanty general coverage by the current eleven volumes of the Advances in Carbohydrate Chemistry is witness to the broad scope and depth of the subject of the carbohydrates. The literature and the available knowledge in the field of carbohydrates, like those of the corresponding fields of the proteins and of the enzymes, are similar in magnitude to those in such broad fields as medicine and dentistry. Preparation of a monograph on starch alone involves dealing with more research material and more basic literature than some specialized branches of medicine. 

In 2001, van Duin (Van Duin et al, 2001) proposed a technique of reaction force field, this method was applied to carbohydrates, the geometry data of compounds from simulation are consistent with the literature well, and the bond parameters agree to the results of quantum chemistry, but the calculation time is much less than the time required for quantum chemical calculations. Subsequently, researchers come to realize the advantages of the reaction force field method compared with quantum chemistry and electrostatic force field methods. Reaction force field parameters that are suitable for other materials have gradually been developed, such as silicon oxide, platinum, and titanium. The reaction force field parameters are theoretically universal and general. When Kim et al (2013) studied the interaction between the titanium oxide and water, sodium ions, chloride ions, methanol, and formic acid and other substances, the interaction parameter of Cl/O/H and Na/O/H is from the hteratures of different systems. 

This Report, the tenth in the series, covers the literature available to us between mid-January 1976 and mid-January 1977. With the publication of this volume, the number of Reports in the series has reached double figures we hope that this Report maintains the standards set by its predecessors in summarizing the recent literature in carbohydrate chemistry in a concise, lively, and palatable form. Once again the literature coverage is comprehensive, rather than selective, although inevitably a few papers are missed each year-we are grateful when these are brought to our attention for inclusion in a subsequent Report. 

The transformation of glycals (1,2-unsaturated cyclic carbohydrate derivatives) into 2,3-unsaturated glycosyl derivatives, currently termed Ferrier rearrangement, is a well-established synthetic procedure with ample use in the fields of carbohydrate and organic chemistry. This article highlights the developments in the Ferrier rearrangement published in the literature since the last review, in 2013, to early 2016. 

The task of relating carbohydrate configurations to names requires either a world class memory or an easily recalled mnemonic A mnemonic that serves us well here was pop ularized by the husband-wife team of Lours F Fieser and Mary Fieser of Harvard Uni versity m their 1956 textbook Organic Chemistry As with many mnemonics it s not clear who actually invented it and references to this particular one appeared m the chem ical education literature before publication of the Fiesers text The mnemonic has two features (1) a system for setting down all the stereoisomeric d aldohexoses m a logical order and (2) a way to assign the correct name to each one... 

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