Post-Glycosylation Diversification (PGD): An Approach for Assembling Collections of Glycosylated Small Molecules

Many small molecule natural products with antibiotic and antiproliferative activity are adorned with a carbohydrate residue as part of their molecular structure. The carbohydrate moiety can act to mediate key interactions with the target, attenuate physicochemical properties, or both. Facile incorporation of a carbohydrate group on de novo small molecules would enable these valuable properties to be leveraged in the evaluation of focused compound libraries. While there is no universal way to incorporate a sugar on small molecule libraries, techniques such as glycorandomization and neoglycorandomization have made signification headway toward this goal. Here, we report a new approach for the synthesis of glycosylated small molecule libraries. It puts the glycosylation early in the synthesis of library compounds. Functionalized aglycones subsequently participate in chemoselective diversification reactions distal to the carbohydrate. As a proof-of-concept, we prepared several desosaminyl glycosides from only a few starting glycosides, using click cycloadditions, acylations, and Suzuki couplings as diversification reactions. New compounds were then characterized for their inhibition of bacterial protein translation, bacterial growth, and in a T-cell activation assay.