Synthesis of a Comprehensive Polyprenol Library for Evaluation of Bacterial Enzyme Lipid Substrate Specificity

Polyprenols, a type of universal glycan lipid carrier, play important roles for glycan bio-assembly in wide variety of living systems. Chemical synthesis of natural polyisoprenols such as undecaprenol and dolichols, but especially their homologs, could serves as a powerful molecular tool to dissect and define the functions of enzymes involved in glycan biosynthesis. In this paper, we report an efficient and reliable method to construct this type of hydrophoic molecule through a base-mediated iterative coupling approach using a key bifunctional (Z, Z)-diisoprenyl building block. The ligation with N-acetyl-D-glactosamine (GalNAc) with a set of the synthesized lipid analogs forming polyprenol pyrophosphate linked GalNAc (GalNAc-PP-lipid) conjugates is also demonstrated.