N-Acetylneuraminic acids (Neu5Ac), sialic acids are most frequently found as a-glycosidically linked terminal residues of glycoproteins and glycolipids. There are a wide range of biological properties endowed by sialic acids on natural glycoconjugate structure and function, often involved in important cell surface communications and infection processes.
1-3)The development of the efficient method of O-sialylation has been a challenging task in the field of sialic acid chemistry. 4,5) Fraser-Reid and his co-workers introduced a 4-pentenyl group as a new and effective leaving group at the anomeric center of the glycosyl donor.6) The attractiveness of 4-pentenyl glycosides is enhanced by the fact that they can be applied to the armed/disarmed methodology of oligosaccharide synthesis.7) 4-Pentenyl glycosides are of interest for studying various biological and physiological phenomena of carbohydrates.8) To the best of our knowledge, there has been no report on the synthesis of 4-pentenoic acid ester of Neu5Ac (1a). A few reports 9,10) on the synthesis of 4-pentenyl glycoside of Neu5Ac (1b) have been reported, however application of 1b to O-sialylation has not been studied. As a part of our program aimed at the development of new O-sialylation, 11,12) we are interested in finding out whether 1a, b would be suitable for stereoselective O-sialylation. This paper describes the synthesis of 1a, b and their application to O-sialylation.
Results and DiscussionWe first focused on an efficient synthesis of 1a having 4-pentenoyloxy group at the 2-position of Neu5Ac as a leaving group. Treatment of per-O-acetylated Neu5Ac 2 with hydrogen chloride in AcCl-AcOH (1 : 1) gave 2-chloro derivative 3 in a quantitative yield. Compound 3 was treated with silver carbonate in acetone-H 2 O (9 : 1) to afford 2-hydroxy derivative 4 13) in 88% yield. Acylation of 4 was achieved by 4-pentenoic anhydride and pyridine and N,N-dimethylaminopyridine (DMAP) in CH 2 Cl 2 to give 1a in a quantitative yield as an anomeric mixture with b-anomer as the major product (Chart 1). Next, we focused on a search for an efficient method of synthesizing 1b. When silver salicylate was used as a promoter in the presence of 4-penten-1-ol in CH 2 Cl 2 , 1b was obtained in 80% yield.9) The best result was obtained when the reaction was performed by Koenigs-Knorr condi- * To whom correspondence should be addressed. e-mail: ikeda@u-shizuoka-ken.ac. Novel sialosyl donors, 4-pentenoic acid ester of N-acetylneuraminic acids (Neu5Ac) (1a) and 4-pentenyl glycoside of Neu5Ac (1b) were successfully prepared from the corresponding per-O-acetylated 2-hydroxy and 2-chloro derivatives of Neu5Ac, respectively and applied to the synthesis of O-sialosides.