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Updated: Jun 18, 2026

Rapid One-step Enzymatic Synthesis and All-aqueous Purification of Trehalose Analogues
Published on: February 17, 2017
Stereoselective syntheses of pentose sugars under realistic prebiotic conditions
Sandra Pizzarello1, Arthur L Weber
1Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-1604, USA. pizzar@asu.edu
Abstract:
Glycolaldehyde and DL-glyceraldehyde reacted in a water-buffered solution under mildly acidic conditions and in the presence of chiral dipeptide catalysts produced pentose sugars whose configuration is affected by the chirality of the catalyst. The chiral effect was found to vary between catalysts and to be largest for di-valine. Lyxose, arabinose, ribose and xylose are formed in different amounts, whose relative proportions do not change significantly with the varying of conditions. With LL-peptide catalysts, ribose was the only pentose sugar to have a significant D-enantiomeric excess (ee) (
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