Nucleoside analogue

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Nucleoside analogue" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (December 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (December 2020) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the German article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 2,041 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Nukleosid-Analogon]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Nukleosid-Analogon}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Nucleoside analogues are structural analogues of a nucleoside, which normally contain a nucleobase and a sugar. Nucleotide analogues are analogues of a nucleotide, which normally has one to three phosphates linked to a nucleoside. Both types of compounds can deviate from what they mimick in a number of ways, as changes can be made to any of the constituent parts (nucleobase, sugar, phosphate).^[1] They are related to nucleic acid analogues.

Nucleoside and nucleotide analogues can be used in therapeutic drugs, including a range of antiviral products used to prevent viral replication in infected cells. The most commonly used is acyclovir.

Nucleotide and nucleoside analogues can also be found naturally. Examples include ddhCTP (3ʹ-deoxy-3′,4ʹdidehydro-CTP) produced by the human antiviral protein viperin^[2] and sinefungin (a S-Adenosyl methionine analogue) produced by some Streptomyces.^[3]