Glycomimetics: design, synthesis and biological activity studies

My PhD project has been focused on the design, synthesis and biological activity studies of glicomimetics. During these three years I have been mainly interested in three different arguments (three proteins: API, Akt, CIM6Pr) that I will elucidate in detail in this thesis. Even if the target proteins (enzymes and receptors) are very different, these three arguments have a common element. In all cases, starting from the known mechanistic, structural and biological information of the single protein, I have designed glycomimetics that are potentially able to interact with the target protein. All the studied proteins are biologically relevant, so the final aim of the synthetic effort is always a biological test, in order to check the hypothesis done during the design step and to get new useful information about the biological system. The synthesized compounds are always glycomimetics or, more generally speaking, glycans: they can be arabinose-based mimetic of A5P, glucose-based mimetic of an inisitol structure, or synthetic glycoproteins. The most used analytical instrument for the characterization of all the synthesized compounds and for the study of their interaction with enzymes is NMR spectroscopy. The wide use of this analytical technique led me to study topics that were not related to carbohydrates themselves, but related to NMR techniques. Therefore, I increased my knowledge and applied NMR spectroscopy to the biomaterial field and in particular I have studied the reactivity of reaction systems widely used for biomaterial production using NMR. I will briefly discuss these works in the last part of my thesis.