Rare sugars are monosaccharides distributed rarely in nature, because of its very limited amount and cost, the biological effect has hardly been studied. Recently, an effective strategy for mass production of rare sugars has been developed. As a result, a wide range of study of rare sugars from the basic to applied research has become possible. For biological application of rare sugars, it is necessary to fundamentally investigate the relationships between rare sugars and living cells in terms of physiology. Therefore, we firstly examined the effect of rare sugars including D-psicose, D-allose, D-altrose and D-talitol on cell proliferation using certain cell lines in vitro. Cell growth was evaluated by MTT assay after 24-, 48- and 72-h treatment. The result shows that D-allose has a significant inhibitory effect on cancer cell proliferation in a dose-dependent manner. Although the exact mechanism remains unclear, this finding represents a novel aspect of the biological profile of D-allose and suggests that D-allose may be an effective adjuvant therapeutic agent against cancer in the future.

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