A periodic table of monosaccharides

Abstract

It is important to recognize the great diversity of monosaccharides commonly encountered in animals, plants, and microbes, as well as to organize them in a visually interesting style that also emphasizes their similarities and relatedness. This article discusses the nature of building blocks, monosaccharides, and monosaccharide derivatives-terms commonly used in discussing "glycomolecules" found in nature. To aid in awareness of monosaccharide diversity, here is presented a Periodic Table of Monosaccharides. The rationale is given for construction of the Table and the selection of 103 monosaccharides, which is largely based on those presented in the KEGG and SNFG websites of monosaccharides, and includes room to enlarge as new discoveries are made. The Table should have educational value and is intended to capture the attention and foster imagination of those not very familiar with glycosciences, and encourage researchers to delve deeper into this fascinating area.

Keywords: building block; derivative; monosaccharide; periodic table.

Fig. 1

Examples of monosaccharides from triose to decose in terms of the number of carbons in their backbone structures, indicated. Many are depicted as in their ring structures as chair conformers and the decose is depicted as a straight chain.

Fig. 2

The monosaccharides and monosaccharide derivatives are depicted in a tabular form are the periodic table of monosaccharides. The groups of sugars are indicated across the top, and the periods of sugars based on the number of carbons in their backbone structure are indicated on the left side. For information about the groups and periods see the text. Each sugar is depicted with its name (in some cases the trivial names and in other cases more complete chemical names), along with an abbreviation for the sugar, its formula, and its average molar mass, as computed by either PubChem 2.1 or the molecular weight calculator at https://www.lenntech.com/calculators/molecular/molecular-weight-calculator.htm. As noted in the text, there is also a symbol nomenclature associated with many of these sugars, that may be accessed at the indicated sites. For the decoses, there do not yet appear to be abbreviations for the two here, so liberty was taken to designate them as dTtd and dEgd, respectively, for the uniformity of the table. Most if not all of the monosaccharides here are accessible at PubChem. There are also additional tools, bioinformatic resources, and repositories available to draw glycan structures and incorporate monosaccharides and their derivatives. A sampling of these resources can be found here (Campbell et al. 2014; Perez et al. 2015; Thieker et al. 2016; Tsuchiya et al. 2019; Kahsay et al. 2020; Lal et al. 2020; Mehta and Cummings 2020; York et al. 2020; Fujita et al. 2021; Cheng et al. 2023).