Molecular Tweezers for Biomimetic Recognition of Carbohydrates

Molecular recognition of biomolecules by means of synthetic receptors is a key topic with several potential applications, which must face the challenge of recognizing relatively large guests in an aqueous medium. Due to their open cavity, molecular tweezers are promising architectures for this purpose that have already shown interesting recognition properties with lipids, nucleic acids, and proteins, thereby eliciting biological activities. Carbohydrates, assembled within glycans, are polar biomolecules of high structural complexity that are particularly difficult to be effectively recognized in water. Notably, in addition to reports on more widely explored structures, significant advances have been achieved exploiting the structural peculiarity of tweezer receptors. In this review a selection of some emblematic examples from the literature of molecular tweezers, cleft and clips targeting carbohydrates is presented, together with a discussion of the advantages and limitations of this type of architecture.