Communications
Glycopeptide Synthesis
regioselective protection and stereoselective glycosylation
reactions. Although progress in solid-phase chemical syn-
thesis meanwhile allowed the construction of a variety of
oligosaccharides,[3] these methods still entail limitation of the
target structures and technical difficulty for general biochem-
ists or medical scientists. Enzymatic synthesis is a potential
alternative to the chemical synthesis of complex oligosac-
charides because of the specificities of both the stereochem-
istry and regioselectivity in the glycosylation reactions.[4]
However, glycosyl acceptor substrates immobilized on solid
supports are not suited for these enzymatic reactions in terms
of efficiency and versatility in practical synthesis.
In the course of our studies of enzymatic synthesis, based
on the cluster effect[5] of sugar-attached water-soluble poly-
mers as multivalent acceptor substrates,[6] our interest has
been focused on the efficient synthesis of glycopeptides as
important signal molecules in cellular recognition.[7] To
achieve a concerted and efficient glycopeptide synthesis
based on a combined chemical and enzymatic strategy, we
thought that the advent of an appropriate methodology to
combine solid-phase peptide synthesis and liquid-phase
carbohydrate synthesis was highly desirable.[4] Herein, we
report a novel strategy of rapid and efficient synthesis of
glycopeptides by using a convenient “molecular transporter”
that interfaces two different polymer supports.
Our synthetic strategy is summarized in Figure 1 as
follows: a) solid-phase synthesis of the photosensitive O-
GlcNAc-peptides terminated by the molecular transporter 1,
b) deprotection and release of the transporter from the resin,
c) chemoselective blotting of the molecular transporter that
carries glycopeptide primers using a water-soluble polymer
with alkoxyamino functional groups,[8] d) one-pot sugar
elongation with glycosyltransferases, and e) release of full-
length glycopeptides from the transporter on the polymer
platform with a photoselective cleavage reaction.
The molecular transporter 1 was synthesized from l-
proline, which was to be used as the N-terminal residue of the
target peptide, by modification with a reactive ketone group
with a photolabile linker moiety, 4-[4-(1-hydroxyethyl)-2-
methoxy-5-nitrophenoxy]butyric acid[9] (see the Supporting
Information).[10] This heterobifunctional linker acts as a trans-
porter between the two different polymer platforms and allows
both chemoselective blotting and photoselective cleavage
(catch and release) of glycopeptides (Figure 1, steps c and e).
We demonstrated the feasibility of our method by
constructing a dodecapeptide with a sialyl LewisX tetrasac-
charide residue (7) as a model compound. Scheme 1 shows
the solid-phase synthesis of a transporter molecule carrying
an intermediate glycopeptide (3) on a Fmoc-Arg(Pbf)-
NovaSynTGA resin using Fmoc-protected amino acids
(Fmoc-AA) and Fmoc-Ser(Ac3GlcNAcb)-OH.[11] Next, the
intermediate on the transporter (3) was blotted onto the
water-soluble polyacrylamide derivative 4[8] by chemoselec-
tive ligation of the ketone group of 3 with the alkoxyamino
group of 4 without any purification process. We suggest that
this blotting step using polymer 4, which we proved is
completed in three hours at room temperature under mild
conditions (pH 5.0–5.5) by monitoring with reversed-phase
(RP) HPLC (Figure 2), is crucial. As anticipated, polymer 4
Molecular Transporter Between Polymer
Platforms: Highly Efficient Chemoenzymatic
Glycopeptide Synthesis by the Combined Use of
Solid-Phase and Water-Soluble Polymer
Supports**
Masataka Fumoto, Hiroshi Hinou,
Takahiko Matsushita, Masaki Kurogochi, Takashi Ohta,
Takaomi Ito, Kuriko Yamada, Akio Takimoto,
Hirosato Kondo, Toshiyuki Inazu, and Shin-
Ichiro Nishimura*
Polymer-supported synthesis is a practical and convenient
method because it simplifies purification of the final products
and makes combinatorial processes feasible. Chemical syn-
thesis on solid-phase polymers made the automated synthesis
of nucleotides (DNA/RNA) and peptides (proteins) possi-
ble,[1,2] and they are now indispensable devices for the
investigation of the functional roles of genomes and proteins
as well as the development of a variety of therapeutic
reagents. Chemical synthesis of glycoconjugates, however, is a
much more difficult task than the synthesis of nucleic acids or
polypeptides because complex structures of glycoconjugates
require extremely time-consuming and tedious procedures of
[*] Dr. H. Hinou, Dr. T. Ohta, Prof. S.-I. Nishimura
Glycochemosynthesis Team, Research Center for Glycoscience
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
(AIST)
Sapporo 062-8517 (Japan)
Fax: (+81)11-857-8441
E-mail: tiger.nishimura@aist.go.jp
T. Matsushita, Dr. M. Kurogochi, Prof. S.-I. Nishimura
Division of Biological Sciences, Graduate School of Science
Hokkaido University, Sapporo 001-0021, Japan
E-mail: shin@glyco.sci.hokudai.ac.jp
M. Fumoto, Dr. K. Yamada
Research Association for Biotechnology
Minato-ku, Tokyo 105-0003 (Japan)
M. Fumoto, T. Ito, Dr. A. Takimoto, Dr. H. Kondo
Shionogi & Co. Ltd.
Chuo-ku, Osaka 541-0045 (Japan)
Dr. K. Yamada
Hitachi High-Technologies Co.
Minato-ku, Tokyo 105-8717 (Japan)
Dr. T. Inazu
Department of Applied Chemistry, School of Engineering,
and Institute of Glycotechnology
Tokai University, Kanagawa 259-1292 (Japan)
[**] This work was partly supported by a grant for “Development of
Methodologies and Databases for Structural Glycoproteomics”
from the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development
Organization (NEDO). We are grateful to Professor Y. Nakahara of
Tokai University for valuable suggestions and comments. We also
thank Ms. S. Oka, Ms. M. Kiuchi, and Mr. T. Hirose of the Center of
Instrumental Analysis, Hokkaido University, for mass spectrometric
measurements and amino acid analysis.
Supporting information for this article is available on the WWW
2534
ꢀ 2005 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim
DOI: 10.1002/anie.200463065
Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2005, 44, 2534 –2537