Technical Abstract: Many toxins owe their mechanisms of action to being structural analogs of essential metabolites, messengers or structural components. Examples range from tubo-curare to penicillin. Ribose plays a unique role in the metabolism of living organisms, whether prokaryotes or eukaryotes. It and its derivatives are essential components of informational macromolecules (DNA, RNA) and of key components in the energy currency of cells (ATP, GTP). Ribose derivatives play key roles in photosynthesis in green plants. In principle, ribose analogs should constitute excellent toxins. They are simple to make, rapidly diffusible, and may be actively transported into target cells. In principle, they could act as effective anti-metabolites that would be toxic by either (i) inhibiting the enzymes that synthesize essential components of the informational or energy systems of the cell; or (ii) serving as substrates for the same enzymes, which would convert ribose analogs to another set of metabolically non-functional analogs.