Adventures in Carbohydrate Chemistry: New Synthetic Technologies, Chemical Synthesis, Molecular Design, and Chemical Biology

The field of carbohydrate chemistry has occupied the minds and hearts of many scientists for over a hundred years and, as we enter the twenty-first century, it continues to be both vigorous and challenging. Among the most exciting aspects of organic chemistry in the last few decades has been the interplay between the specialized subdisciplines of carbohydrate chemistry and total synthesis, each enabling and advancing the other in new directions and towards greater heights. In this review article we highlight our own adventures at the interface of these disciplines, which were driven for the most part by objectives in chemical synthesis and chemical biology. Specifically, we describe our interests and efforts to utilize carbohydrates as starting materials for total synthesis, to invent and develop new synthetic technologies for carbohydrate synthesis, to construct complex oligosaccharides in solution or on solid support, and to utilize carbohydrate templates as scaffolds for peptide mimetics and for molecular diversity construction. Finally, applications of the developed synthetic strategies and enabling technologies towards the solution of biologically significant problems are discussed.