Mechanistic aspects of enzymatic carbohydrate epimerization.

Carbohydrate epimerases are enzymes that catalyze an inversion of stereochemistry at a stereogenic center in a sugar. This review focuses on the mechanistic strategies that are employed by this diverse family of enzymes, and is divided into the following sections: deprotonation/reprotonation, transient oxidation, cofactor independent, and mutarotation. The review is comprehensive up to Oct. 2001 and contains 216 references.