Enantiopure Nucleosides from Carbohydrates

The design and synthesis of nucleoside analogues as potential anticancer and antiviral agents is a very dynamic field of research. The core objective of this intense research is amendment in sugar and base moieties to make the nucleoside more apt for therapeutic response. The drug industry now a day is giving more emphasis on chiral molecules as these are much more specific to the target. Even the two enantiomers of a particular substrate may interact differently with different chiral pockets and show different kinds of activity. So it is imperative to devise routes to nucleosides, which yield desired molecular structures with specific stereochemistry. Carbohydrates with six chiral centers are nice starting materials for this purpose. Among the carbohydrates, D-glucose is a useful chiral template, as it is cheap, easily available. Three chapters of this book is dealing with the use of various simple and useful reactions on glucose molecule to synthesize chiral carbocyclic (Chapter 1), heterocyclic (Chapter 2) and bicyclic (Chapter 3) nucleosides and analogues.