Supple sugars enable smallest cyclodextrins ever

Japanese chemists have looped glucopyranose sugars into the smallest ever cyclodextrin rings, containing just three and four sugar units. Previously, scientists thought such structures impossible because the rings would be under too much strain, explains Hidetoshi Yamada at Kwansei Gakuin University. But now his team has revealed ‘the proven existence of the cyclic trimer and tetramer’, Yamada tells Chemistry World.