Carbohydrate-based mimetics in drug design: Sugar amino acids and carbohydrate scaffolds

The synthesis and transformations and some of the pharmacological features of sugar amino acids, as they represent unique structures among carbohydrates and peptides, were reviewed. The examples presented demonstrate a wide range of their applicability, from structural to functional mimetics of natural products. As such, sugar amino acids (SAAs) oligomers represent novel oligosaccharide structures with distinct secondary and tertiary structures that may help to contribute to the understanding of bio-(macro-)-molecular assemblies, similar to the peptidic foldamers intesively described by the groups of Gellman and Seebach.