Chinese scholars have made progress in the field of automatic synthesis of glycans

Figure Illustration of automated synthesis of polysaccharides (1080 sugars).

With the support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number: 21738001, 81821004), Professor Ye Xinshan's team at Peking University has made progress in the field of artificial chemical synthesis of carbohydrate compounds, and the relevant results have been "Automated solution-phase multiplicative synthesis of complex glycans up to a 1080- mer)", published
in Nature Synthesis on September 29, 2022.
Links to papers: https://doi.
org/10.
1038/s44160-022-00171-9
.

Carbohydrates are ubiquitous in nature and are involved in almost all life processes
of multicellular organisms.
However, due to the inherent complexity of the structure of carbohydrate compounds, it is difficult to synthesize glycan compounds with clear and uniform structure, and often requires high-skilled professionals to complete it by hand, which is time-consuming and laborious, which seriously restricts the development of sugar science.
The synthesis of polysaccharide compounds with larger molecular sizes and more complex structures is a challenging task
.
The efficient acquisition of glycans has become an important bottleneck restricting the development of sugar science.
Therefore, the synthesis paradigm of carbohydrate compounds needs to be changed
urgently.
Based on the "pre-activation" multi-component glycosylation reaction developed in the early stage, Professor Ye Xinshan's team developed a sugar automatic synthesizer, which quickly and automatically synthesized oligosaccharide compound libraries containing various glycoform and glycosidic bond ligation modes and important biological activities in the mode of ordinary activation or light-mediated activation, and automatically synthesized the anticoagulant anticoagulant hepataparinose pentasaccharide
with protective groups at the gram scale and high yield.
At the same time, using monosaccharides as raw materials, a pot of ten-component automatic coupling reaction was successfully realized to obtain polyarabinose.

On this basis, the research team used the liquid phase multiplication synthesis strategy to automatically synthesize arabinan 120 sugar, 360 sugar and 1080 sugar
with uniform structure.
Among them, 1080 saccharide is the longest polysaccharide molecule synthesized at present, which for the first time raises the number of monomer components with homogeneous biological macromolecule complexity to a new level, which is a milestone in the field of polysaccharide synthesis (Figure).

The successful development of this new dual-mode liquid phase sugar automatic synthesizer has effectively promoted the development of sugar automatic synthesis technology, providing a platform for non-professionals to assemble target glycans, and providing novel and effective tools
for the development of glycoscience and its application in the field of medicine and materials.