Synthetic Glycosides and Glycoconjugates of Low Molecular Weight Natural Products

Enzymatically controlled transfer of saccharide moieties constitutes a fundamental biological process, essential for both primary and secondary metabolism. Natural products, including countless glycosides, with a rich tradition of use in ethnopharmacology, remain a prime source of inspiration for medicinal chemistry and molecular pharmacology, but their availability from biological sources is usually scarce, hampering attempts at application for new drug discovery and development. Chemical glycosylation on the other hand, although continuously undergoing sophisticated mechanistic studies, has nevertheless already matured as a set of methods which are able to provide substantial amounts of pure chemical entities: natural glycosides, as well as their congeners and mimics, necessary for the study of biological activity in quality assurance systems and required for drug development by pharmaceutical regulations. The paper presents a review of natural products and their analogues glycosylation, in a set of arbitrary selected examples, supplemented with comments on general advances in chemical glycosylation methodology and their applicability for particular categories of secondary metabolites.