Is N-acetyl-d-glucosamine a rigid 4C1 chair?

Understanding microsecond-timescale dynamics is crucial to establish three-dimensional (3D) structure–activity relationships in sugars but has been intractable to experiments and simulations. As a consequence, whether arguably the most important chemical scaffold in glycobiology, N-acetyl-d-glucosamine (GlcNAc), deviates from a rigid 4C1 chair is unknown. Here, conformer populations and exchange kinetics were quantified from the longest aqueous carbohydrate simulations to date (0.2 ms total) of GlcNAc, four derivatives from heparan sulfate and their methylglycosides. Unmodified GlcNAc took 3–5 μs to reach a conformational equilibrium, which comprised a metastable 4C1 chair that underwent 4C1 ↔ 1C4 transitions at a predicted forward rate of 0.8 μs−1 with an average 1C4-chair lifetime of 3 ns. These predictions agree with high-resolution crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance but not with the hypothesis that GlcNAc is a rigid 4C1 chair, concluded from previous experimental analyses and non-aqueous modeling. The methylglycoside was calculated to have a slower forward rate (0.3 μs−1) and a more stable 4C1 conformer (0.2 kcal mol−1), suggesting that pivotal 3D intermediates (particularly 2SO, 1S5 and B2,5) increased in energy, and water was implicated as a major cause. Sulfonation (N-, 3-O and 6-O) significantly augmented this effect by blocking pseudorotation, but did not alter the rotational preferences of hydroyxl or hydroxymethyl groups. We therefore propose that GlcNAc undergoes puckering exchange that is dependent on polymerization and sulfo substituents. Our analyses, and 3D model of the equilibrium GlcNAc conformer in water, can be used as dictionary data and present new opportunities to rationally modify puckering and carbohydrate bioactivity, with diverse applications from improving crop yields to disease amelioration.