2014 Volume 13 Issue 5 Pages 263-267
Conformations and their behaviors of saccharide and glycan take a part of the essential functions in intravital molecular recognition mechanism. Due to the detailed conformational analysis has been made possible by the development of the experimental measurements and computational simulation technology, uniform nomenclature system for saccharide conformations including hydroxyl groups on the pyranose ring is needed rather than usage of conventional descriptions depending on the past researches. In this work, new nomenclature system for aldohexopyranose conformation, which is the unified nomenclature of both the legal IUPAC rule for describing aldohexopyranose ring conformations and our original definition of the notations for rotational isomers of hydroxyl groups on the ring, have been proposed. To describing their orientation of hydroxyl groups on pyranose ring, that is "clockwise" or "reverse clockwise" along the ring, and "inside" or "outside" of the ring, four types of notation; "c" or "r," and "i," or "o," respectively, have been introduced. We applied this method to all stable conformers of α/β-D-glucopyranose, α/β-D-galactopyranose, α/β-D-mannopyranose, and confirmed that almost all conformers can distinguish uniquely.
