Biocatalyzed Synthesis of Glycostructures with Anti-infective Activity.

Molecules containing carbohydrate moieties play essential roles in fighting a variety of bacterial and viral infections. Consequently, the design of new carbohydrate-containing drugs or vaccines has attracted great attention in recent years as means to target several infectious diseases.Conventional methods to produce these compounds face numerous challenges because their current production technology is based on chemical synthesis, which often requires several steps and uses environmentally unfriendly reactants, contaminant solvents, and inefficient protocols. The search for sustainable processes such as the use of biocatalysts and eco-friendly solvents is of vital importance. Therefore, their use in a variety of reactions leading to the production of pharmaceuticals has increased exponentially in the last years, fueled by recent advances in protein engineering, enzyme directed evolution, combinatorial biosynthesis, immobilization techniques, and flow biocatalysis. In glycochemistry and glycobiology, enzymes belonging to the families of glycosidases, glycosyltransferases (Gtfs), lipases, and, in the case of nucleoside and nucleotide analogues, also nucleoside phosphorylases (NPs) are the preferred choices as catalysts.In this Account, on the basis of our expertise, we will discuss the recent biocatalytic and sustainable approaches that have been employed to synthesize carbohydrate-based drugs, ranging from antiviral nucleosides and nucleotides to antibiotics with antibacterial activity and glycoconjugates such as neoglycoproteins (glycovaccines, GCVs) and glycodendrimers that are considered as very promising tools against viral and bacterial infections.In the first section, we will report the use of NPs and