Thioglycosides reactivity

Scheme 34 Thioglycosides reactivity tuning by postsynthetic aglycon modifications [106]...

Thioglycosides can be activated for gfycosylation reactions with sulfur electrophiles, e.g., with dimethyl(methylthio)sulfonium triflate or with methanesulfenyi bromide and silver(l +) to form reactive sulfonium intermediates (F. Dasgupta, 1988). 

Thus, it seems that the concept of anomeric electronic activation-deactivation at the anomeric center taking precedence over armed-disarmed in the remainder of the pyranose ring might have reasonable validity, but, in many instances, the difference in reactivity of the p-nitrophenyl thioglycoside versus the p-acetamidophenyl thioglycoside is not enough to make this work (Scheme 1l).94... 

Recently, a number of thiophilic activators that can activate thioglycosides of low reactivity at low temperature have been described. For example, thiophilic promoter systems, such as diphenylsulfoxide [87,99], S-(4-methoxyphenyl)benzenethiosulfinate... 

Thioglycosides can also be activated by a one-electron transfer reaction from sulfur to the activating reagent tris-(4-bromophenyl)ammoniumyl hexachloroanti-monate (TBPA+) [102,103]. The use of this promoter was inspired by an earlier report where activation was achieved under electrochemical conditions to give an intermediate S-glycosyl radical cation intermediate [104], and the reactivity and mechanism have also been explored [105,106]. 

Wong and coworkers showed that 5-azido sialyl donors protected with O-acetyl ester are useful for a-selective glycosylations of primary hydroxyls (Scheme 4.6e) [169]. It was proposed that the linear and electron-withdrawing nature of the C-5 azido moiety stabilizes the reactive axial acetonitrile adduct to allow the incoming nucleophile to approach the a-face in an SN2-like fashion. In addition, a chemose-lective glycosylation method has been developed for the synthesis of NeuAca-(2 —> 9) NeuAc as thioglycoside donor for use in the subsequent glycosylations [169]. 

Chemical entities discussed in this chapter as glycosyl donors share the principal structural feature C(anomeric)—sulfur atom bond with thioglycosides, discussed earlier. However, the electron density on the sulfur atom is diminished, and consequently its chemical reactivity differs considerably, because of substitution with electron-withdrawing groups such as carboxylic or phosphoric acid residues. This... 

Fucosyl phosphate 36 also very efficiently glycosylated the C4 position of acceptor 32. The orthogonality of the activating conditions of thioglycosides and glycosyl phosphate donors was exploited in the synthesis of trisaccharide glycal 41 (Scheme 6.7A).32 Furthermore, the different reactivity of a- and p-glycosyl phosphates was... 

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