The Laboratory of Glycochemistry, formerly known as the Synthetic Chemistry of Carbohydrate Solutions research group (founded in 2000), separated in 2021 from the N.K. Kochetkov Laboratory of Carbohydrate Chemistry (at ZIOC RAS), which has a world-wide reputation of the one of the leading centers of carbohydrate research.

The laboratory specializes in the chemical synthesis of carbohydrates of biological significance: mono-, oligo- and poly-saccharides and various glycoconjugates on their basis.

The research of our laboratory is mostly focused on the development of new approaches to glycosylation by exploring  two complementary avenues:

• Traditional mechanism-based approach which is mainly concerned with molecular structure of glycosyl donor and reactive species generated from it upon reaction with a promoter.
• Innovative approach, recently proposed by us, which explicitly accounts for the structure of a reaction solution and is based on the hypothesis that in many cases the real reactive species in solution are non-covalently-bonded supramolecular aggregates, “supramers”, rather than isolated molecules of reagents. According to the “supramer” approach, molecular structure and reaction conditions determine the structure of the resulting “supramers”, hence their chemical properties.

We  aim at developing effective means of influencing the glycosylation outcome by modulating the structure of the reaction solution, which is to be achieved both by the design of the molecular structure of glycosyl donors and glycosyl acceptors and by rational choice of the conditions of the glycosylation reactions by making use of “supramer” approach.