Carbohydrate Chemistry and Room Temperature Ionic Liquids (RTILs): Recent Trends, Opportunities, Challenges and Future Perspectives

Since past few decades, Room Temperature Ionic Liquids (RTILs) have extensively been used in organic synthesis as solvents, catalysts and catalyst/solvents in chemical as well as enzymatic reactions, whereas their interest in various different branches of science is expanding exponentially. RTILs show an enhanced performance in a number of syntheses involving carbohydrates when compared to the conventional organic solvents owing to their very interesting and attractive features, viz. simple handling, high yield, less reaction time, benign environmental character, ease of synthesis and excellent recyclability. Carbohydrates are not known only for their vital commercial applications as foods, drugs and chemical feed stocks etc., but sugar based molecules are also identified to play pivotal roles in various pathologically and physiologically important biological processes including cellular recognition, adhesion, migration, invasion, communication, bacterial/viral infection, tumor metastasis etc. The clear understanding of role of sugars in these important biological events has led to the increased demand for significant amounts of carbohydrate based molecules for complete chemical, biological, medicinal, and pharmacological investigations. Therefore, tremendous efforts have been made to develop novel and facile procedures for the synthesis of sugar based molecules of great biological interest and their modification. With an increasing focus on the glycomics, the RTILs solvent may offer promising solutions in carbohydrate chemistry. However, there is lack of recent and concise reports dealing with the RTILs in the field of carbohydrate chemistry particularly, in relevance to dissolution and functionalization, and their further modifications including glycosylation. This review highlights the application of RTILs that have been extensively used in carbohydrate chemistry.