Some of these glycosidases are also able to synthetically transglycosylate in the presence of high concentrations of an acceptor molecule, a reaction implying the transfer of a sugar moiety from a substrate to an acceptor molecule ( Morant et al., 2008).

Most of these enzymes are retaining exo-glycosidases ( Coutinho et al., 2003). Glycosyl hydrolases, so-called glycosidases, remove specific sugar moieties. Specific plant glycosyltransferases (GTs) using nucleotide-sugars as donors can attach specific sugar moieties to an acceptor molecule ( Henrissat and Davies, 2000 Jones and Vogt, 2001). Plants produce a huge variety of secondary metabolites that can be decorated with sugars, i.e., glycosylated ( Jones and Vogt, 2001 Gachon et al., 2005 Wink, 2015). Besides the nutritional value, plant-derived food influences the microbiome in the gastrointestinal tract with physiological effects ( Theilmann et al., 2017). Plants provide nutrition and the human body has evolved to thrive optimally on this nourishment. Introduction Plant Metabolites and Their Glycosylation Here, special attention is paid on the use of such probes in plant science that promote the discovery of novel enzymes and the identification of potential therapeutic inhibitors and chaperones. These so-called activity-based probes allow unprecedented visualization of glycosidases cross-species. The novel insights have allowed the design of functionalized highly specific suicide inhibitors of glycosidases. The increasing knowledge on glycosidases, including structure and catalytic mechanism, is described. The therapeutic value of plant glycosidases is discussed as well as the present production in plant platforms of therapeutic human glycosidases used in enzyme replacement therapies. Next, focus is given to glycosidases, the central theme of the review. The documented value of plant-derived glycoconjugates to beneficially modulate metabolism is first addressed.

Plants contain numerous glycoconjugates that are metabolized by specific glucosyltransferases and hydrolyzed by specific glycosidases, some also catalyzing synthetic transglycosylation reactions. 2Department of Bio-organic Synthesis, Leiden Institute of Chemistry, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands.

1Department of Medical Biochemistry, Leiden Institute of Chemistry, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands.

Kassiani Kytidou 1*, Marta Artola 1,2, Herman S.

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