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Organic chemistry

Synthetic lessons from nature

Nature volume 459, pages 786–787 (2009)Cite this article

Most syntheses in organic chemistry target one molecule, or a few closely related analogues at most. But by taking a leaf from nature's book, the latest synthetic strategy opens the door to a whole family of compounds.

Naturally occurring compounds — known as 'natural products' to chemists — have had a long-standing role in the process of drug discovery. Many of them have useful biological activities and have become the foundations of new classes of therapeutic agents. A severe constraint on such efforts, however, is the limited availability of many natural products, which are often present in vanishingly small quantities in their native organisms. The de novo synthesis of natural products is therefore a crucial area of research, because it can increase the availability of a compound and enable the preparation of various analogues that might have better activity than the naturally occurring molecule. On page 824 of this issue, Chen and Baran1 describe a tremendous advance for the field: a biomimetically inspired strategy for the rapid construction of a family of 'terpene' natural products, starting from one common intermediate.

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Figure 1: Biological and biomimetic syntheses of terpenes.

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  1. Huw M. L. Davies is in the Department of Chemistry, Emory University, 440 Atwood Hall, Atlanta, Georgia 30322, USA. hmdavie@emory.edu,

    Huw M. L. Davies

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  1. Huw M. L. Davies
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Davies, H. Synthetic lessons from nature. Nature 459, 786–787 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/459786a

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