Carbohydrate Mimetics: A New Strategy for Tackling the Problem of Carbohydrate-Mediated Biological Recognition.

Useful strategies for the design of molecules to mimic carbohydrates have been developed over the past few years. Mimics of the target may contain new functional groups, a new scaffold, or both (in the schematic representation the natural ligand is shown on the left and the modified version on the right). Many examples of successful carbohydrate mimetics that interfere with sugar-protein and sugar-nucleic acid interactions are known.