Discovery of selective monosaccharide receptors via dynamic combinatorial chemistry†

The molecular recognition of saccharides by synthetic hosts has become an appealing but elusive task in the last decades. Herein, we combine Dynamic Combinatorial Chemistry (DCC) for the rapid self-assembly and screening of virtual libraries of receptors, with the use of ITC and NMR to validate the hits and molecular modelling to understand the binding mechanisms. We discovered a minimalistic receptor, 1F (N-benzyl-l-phenylalanine), with considerable affinity for fructose (K_a = 1762 M⁻¹) and remarkable selectivity (>50-fold) over other common monosaccharides. The approach accelerates the discovery process of receptors for saccharides.