Embed Doc
Copy Link
Readcast
Collections

CommentGo Back

chapter

arbohydrates are the most abundant biomoleculeson Earth. Each year, photosynthesis converts morethan 100 billion metric tons of CO

and H

O into cellu-lose and other plant products. Certain carbohydrates(sugar and starch) are a dietary staple in most parts of the world, and the oxidation of carbohydrates is the cen-tral energy-yielding pathway in most nonphotosyntheticcells. Insoluble carbohydrate polymers serve as struc-tural and protective elements in the cell walls of bacte-ria and plants and in the connective tissues of animals.Other carbohydrate polymers lubricate skeletal jointsand participate in recognition and adhesion betweencells. More complex carbohydrate polymers covalentlyattached to proteins or lipids act as signals that deter-mine the intracellular location or metabolic fate of thesehybrid molecules, called

glycoconjugates.

This chap-ter introduces the major classes of carbohydrates andglycoconjugates and provides a few examples of theirmany structural and functional roles.Carbohydrates are polyhydroxy aldehydes or ke-tones, or substances that yield such compounds on hy-drolysis. Many, but not all, carbohydrates have the em-pirical formula (CH

; some also contain nitrogen,phosphorus, or sulfur.There are three major size classes of carbohydrates:monosaccharides, oligosaccharides, and polysaccha-rides (the word “saccharide” is derived from the Greek

sakcharon,

meaning “sugar”).

Monosaccharides,

orsimple sugars, consist of a single polyhydroxy aldehydeor ketone unit. The most abundant monosaccharide innature is the six-carbon sugar

-glucose, sometimes re-ferred to as dextrose. Monosaccharides of more thanfour carbons tend to have cyclic structures.

Oligosaccharides

consist of short chains of mono-saccharide units, or residues, joined by characteristiclinkages called glycosidic bonds. The most abundant arethe

disaccharides,

with two monosaccharide units.Typical is sucrose (cane sugar), which consists of thesix-carbon sugars

-glucose and

-fructose. All commonmonosaccharides and disaccharides have names endingwith the suffix “-ose.” In cells, most oligosaccharidesconsisting of three or more units do not occur as freeentities but are joined to nonsugar molecules (lipids orproteins) in glycoconjugates.The

polysaccharides

are sugar polymers contain-ing more than 20 or so monosaccharide units, and somehave hundreds or thousands of units. Some polysac-charides, such as cellulose, are linear chains; others,

CARBOHYDRATES ANDGLYCOBIOLOGY

7.1Monosaccharides and Disaccharides

239

7.2Polysaccharides

247

7.3Glycoconjugates: Proteoglycans,Glycoproteins,andGlycolipids

255

7.4Carbohydrates as Informational Molecules: The Sugar Code

261

7.5Working with Carbohydrates

267

Ah! sweet mystery of life ...

—Rida Johnson Young (lyrics) and Victor Herbert (music),“Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life,”1910

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for manif he spent less time proving that he can outwit Natureand more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

—E.B.White,“Coon Tree,”1977

238

8885d_c07_238-272 11/21/03 7:38 AM Page 238 Mac113 mac113:122_EDL:

Chapter 7

Carbohydrates and Glycobiology

239

such as glycogen, are branched. Both glycogen and cel-lulose consist of recurring units of

-glucose, but theydiffer in the type of glycosidic linkage and consequentlyhave strikingly different properties and biological roles.

7.1 Monosaccharides and Disaccharides

The simplest of the carbohydrates, the monosaccha-rides, are either aldehydes or ketones with two or morehydroxyl groups; the six-carbon monosaccharides glu-cose and fructose have five hydroxyl groups. Many of the carbon atoms to which hydroxyl groups are attachedare chiral centers, which give rise to the many sugarstereoisomers found in nature. We begin by describingthe families of monosaccharides with backbones of threeto seven carbons—their structure and stereoisomericforms, and the means of representing their three-dimensional structures on paper. We then discuss sev-eral chemical reactions of the carbonyl groups of mono-saccharides. One such reaction, the addition of ahydroxyl group from within the same molecule, gener-ates the cyclic forms of five- and six-carbon sugars (theforms that predominate in aqueous solution) and cre-ates a new chiral center, adding further stereochemicalcomplexity to this class of compounds. The nomencla-ture for unambiguously specifying the configurationabout each carbon atom in a cyclic form and the meansof representing these structures on paper are thereforedescribed in some detail; this information will be usefulas we discuss the metabolism of monosaccharides inPart II. We also introduce here some important mono-saccharide derivatives encountered in later chapters.

The Two Families of Monosaccharides Are Aldosesand Ketoses

Monosaccharides are colorless, crystalline solids thatare freely soluble in water but insoluble in nonpolar sol- vents. Most have a sweet taste. The backbones of com-mon monosaccharide molecules are unbranched carbonchains in which all the carbon atoms are linked by sin-gle bonds. In the open-chain form, one of the carbonatoms is double-bonded to an oxygen atom to form acarbonyl group; each of the other carbon atoms has ahydroxyl group. If the carbonyl group is at an end of thecarbon chain (that is, in an aldehyde group) the mono-saccharide is an

aldose;

if the carbonyl group is at anyother position (in a ketone group) the monosaccharideis a

ketose.

The simplest monosaccharides are the twothree-carbon trioses: glyceraldehyde, an aldotriose, anddihydroxyacetone, a ketotriose (Fig. 7–1a).Monosaccharides with four, five, six, and seven car-bon atoms in their backbones are called, respectively,tetroses, pentoses, hexoses, and heptoses. There arealdoses and ketoses of each of these chain lengths:aldotetroses and ketotetroses, aldopentoses and ke-topentoses, and so on. The hexoses, which include thealdohexose

-glucose and the ketohexose

-fructose(Fig. 7–1b), are the most common monosaccharides innature. The aldopentoses

-ribose and 2-deoxy-

-ribose(Fig. 7–1c) are components of nucleotides and nucleicacids (Chapter 8).

Monosaccharides Have Asymmetric Centers

All the monosaccharides except dihydroxyacetone con-tain one or more asymmetric (chiral) carbon atoms andthus occur in optically active isomeric forms (pp. 17–19)

The simplest aldose, glyceraldehyde, contains onechiral center (the middle carbon atom) and therefore hastwo different optical isomers, or enantiomers (Fig. 7–2).

H COOH

Dihydroxyacetone,a ketotriose

OHCCHHHH C OH

OHCHH

Glyceraldehyde,an aldotriose

OCH

(a)(b)

-Fructose,a ketohexose

COOHCCHCHHHOCH

HOHOHCH

-Glucose,an aldohexose

C OHCCHHHOCH

HOHOHCHOCH

(c)

2-Deoxy-

-ribose,an aldopentose

C OHOCHHCH

OHCH

-Ribose,an aldopentose

C OHCHHCH

OHOHCHCH

OCH

FIGURE 7–1

Representative monosaccharides.(a)

Two trioses, analdose and a ketose. The carbonyl group in each is shaded.

(b)

Twocommon hexoses.

(c)

The pentose components of nucleic acids.

-Ribose is a component of ribonucleic acid (RNA), and 2-deoxy-

-ribose is a component of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).

8885d_c07_238-272 11/21/03 7:38 AM Page 239 Mac113 mac113:122_EDL:

By convention, one of these two forms is designated the

isomer, the other the

isomer. As for other biomole-cules with chiral centers, the absolute configurations of sugars are known from x-ray crystallography. To repre-sent three-dimensional sugar structures on paper, weoften use

Fischer projection formulas

(Fig. 7–2).In general, a molecule with

chiral centers canhave2

stereoisomers. Glyceraldehyde has 2



2; thealdohexoses, with four chiral centers, have 2



16stereoisomers. The stereoisomers of monosaccharidesof each carbon-chain length can be divided into twogroups that differ in the configuration about the chiralcenter

most distant

from the carbonyl carbon. Thosein which the configuration at this reference carbon isthe same as that of

-glyceraldehyde are designated

isomers, and those with the same configuration as

-glyceraldehyde are

isomers. When the hydroxyl groupon the reference carbon is on the right in the projectionformula, the sugar is the

isomer; when on the left, itis the

isomer. Of the 16 possible aldohexoses, eight are

forms and eight are

. Most of the hexoses of livingorganisms are

isomers.Figure 7–3 shows the structures of the

stereoiso-mers of all the aldoses and ketoses having three to sixcarbon atoms. The carbons of a sugar are numbered be-ginning at the end of the chain nearest the carbonylgroup. Each of the eight

-aldohexoses, which differ inthe stereochemistry at C-2, C-3, or C-4, has its ownname:

-glucose,

-galactose,

-mannose, and so forth(Fig. 7–3a). The four- and five-carbon ketoses are des-ignated by inserting “ul” into the name of a correspond-ing aldose; for example,

-ribulose is the ketopentosecorresponding to the aldopentose

-ribose. The keto-hexoses are named otherwise: for example, fructose(from the Latin

fructus,

“fruit”; fruits are rich in thissugar) and sorbose (from

Sorbus,

the genus of moun-tain ash, which has berries rich in the related sugar al-cohol sorbitol). Two sugars that differ only in the con-figuration around one carbon atom are called

epimers;

-glucose and

-mannose, which differ only in the stere-ochemistry at C-2, are epimers, as are

-glucose and

-galactose (which differ at C-4) (Fig. 7–4).Some sugars occur naturally in their

form; exam-ples are

-arabinose and the

isomers of some sugar de-rivatives that are common components of glycoconju-gates (Section 7.3).

The Common MonosaccharidesHave Cyclic Structures

For simplicity, we have thus far represented the struc-tures of aldoses and ketoses as straight-chain molecules(Figs 7–3, 7–4). In fact, in aqueous solution, aldotet-roses and all monosaccharides with five or more carbonatoms in the backbone occur predominantly as cyclic(ring) structures in which the carbonyl group hasformed a covalent bond with the oxygen of a hydroxyl

-Arabinose

OAAAAOOO

OHCH

CHHHOCH

HOOCH

G J

Part I

Structure and Catalysis

240FIGURE 7–2

Three ways to represent the two stereoisomers of glyc-eraldehyde.

The stereoisomers are mirror images of each other. Ball-and-stick models show the actual configuration of molecules. By con-vention, in Fischer projection formulas, horizontal bonds project outof the plane of the paper, toward the reader; vertical bonds projectbehind the plane of the paper, away from the reader. Recall (see Fig.1–17) that in perspective formulas, solid wedge-shaped bonds pointtoward the reader, dashed wedges point away.

MirrorCH

Ball-and-stick models

OHCHOCHOOHHHOH

CHOHCCH

OHHO

-Glyceraldehyde

Perspective formulas

-Glyceraldehyde

CCH

OHHCHOCHOCHOOHH CCH

-Glyceraldehyde

CCH