Antimicrobial and cytotoxic activities of short carbon chain unsaturated sucrose esters

A library of C3–C5 unsaturated 6-O-sucrose esters have been investigated for their antibacterial, antifungal, and cytotoxic activities. Most of the target compounds showed good inhibitory activity against a variety of clinically and food contaminant important microbial pathogens. In particular, 6-O-methacryloyl sucrose 2 and 1′,2,3,3′,4,4′,6′-hepta-O-acetyl-6-O-methacryloyl sucrose 9 were the most active bactericides against all the tested bacteria with minimal inhibitory concentrations (MICs) ranging between 0.24 and 1.40 μM. The compound 9 showed also the highest antifungal activity with MICs from 0.28 to 1.10 μM. The synthesized compounds possessed low cytotoxicity against human breast, lung, cervical, and hepatocellular carcinoma cell lines without showing toxicity for non-tumor liver cells. Thus, this library of short carbon chain unsaturated sucrose esters represent promising leads for the development of new generation of sucrose-based antimicrobial agents.