Nucleosides are central biomolecules that play key roles in a variety of cellular processes by serving as enzymatic cofactors, building blocks of DNA and RNA and energy transport systems. As such, modified nucleosides mimicking their natural counterparts have a long history in medicinal and biological chemistry. Today, modified nucleosides are indispensable pharmaceuticals for the treatment of various types of cancer and viral infections and further represent important tools in chemical biology for a spectrum of imaging applications. Despite the great demand for these molecules, the synthesis of nucleosides is still regarded as challenging and inefficient. While nucleosides with ribosyl or 2ʹ-desoxyribosyl moieties can be accessed from naturally occurring nucleosides or carbohydrates, the preparation of sugar-modified nucleosides typically suffers from lengthy reaction sequences and low total yields. Furthermore, a heavy reliance on protecting groups entails low overall efficiencies and several sugar modifications at the 2ʹ or 4ʹ positions are known to limit diastereoselectivity in glycosylation approaches, severely complicating the synthetic access to many target compounds. More importantly, established routes typically exhibit a lack of divergence as they tend to be specific to one nucleoside. As such, the introduction of desired substitutions at the nucleobase often requires complete or partial re-synthesis of the target molecule since a general strategy for the efficient diversification of modified nucleosides has not been reported to date (Scheme 1, top). With the advent of scalable routes for the de novo synthesis of selected 4ʹ-modified nucleoside analogs, as reported recently by Britton, such a diversification strategy would readily provide access to a variety of sought-after nucleosides.