Facile protection-free one-pot chemical synthesis of nucleoside-5'-tetraphosphates

A new, straightforward, reliable, and convenient protection-free one-pot method for the synthesis of 2'-deoxynucleoside-5'-tetraphosphate and ribonucleoside-5'-tetraphosphate is reported. The present synthetic strategy involves the monophosphorylation of a nucleoside followed by reaction with tris-(tri-n-butylammonium) triphosphate and subsequent hydrolysis of the putative cyclic tetrametaphosphate intermediate to provide nucleoside-5'-tetraphosphate in moderate yield with high purity. A plausible mechanism is proposed to account for the formation of product.