The Leloir pathway is a metabolic pathway for the catabolism of D-galactose. It is named after Luis Federico Leloir. In the first step α-D-galactose is phosphorylated by a kinase to galactose 1-phosphate. Also part of this pathway is a mutarotase that facilitates the conversion of β-D-galactose to α-D-galactose since the kinase is only active with the α-form of D-galactose. D-galactose-1-phosphate uridylyltransferase is producing D-glucose 1-phosphate; UDP-galactose-4-epimerase is to recycle the UDP-galactose to UDP-glucose for the transferase reaction and phosphoglucomutase converts the D-glucose 1-phosphate to D-glucose 6-phosphate.[2][3]