Short and Sweet: D ‐Glucose to L ‐Glucose and L ‐Glucuronic Acid

The scarcity and expense of access to L ‐sugars and other rare sugars have prevented the exploitation of their biological potential; for example D ‐psicose, only recently available, has been recognized as an important new food. Here we give the definitive and cheap synthesis of 99.4% pure L ‐glucose from D ‐glucose which requires purification of neither intermediates nor final product other than extraction into and removal of solvents; a simple crystallization will raise the purity to >99.8%.