Natural products have been designed by Nature for her own purpose. Hence, as privileged structures being capable of interacting to specific biological systems, they have always been a source of inspiration for the development of medicinally relevant scaffolds. Likewise, the science of synthesis, from methodological developments to total synthesis, has been stimulated by the various biological activities exhibited by natural products as well as their often challenging structures. These properties, which have been experimentally unveiled in laboratories, reflect the function of natural products in the environment. These functions explain the meaning of their existence and why living organisms are spending a lot of energy and matter to build, thank to specific machinery, often complex chemical architectures for the delight of organic chemists. Synthetic strategies are still evolving to get closer to the “ideal synthesis”, which takes into account new constraints such as atom-, step-, redox- and pot-economy. They have always been developed to help answer questions, improve the access to often rare compounds, improve their biological activity through diversity-oriented synthesis (DOS) or function-oriented synthesis (FOS) and understand their enzymatic origin through bio-inspired or biomimetic approaches.
The Frontiers Research Topic on Natural Product Synthesis will aim at merging original research and review articles by leading authors to provide readers with the very last advances in this field. It will cover all natural product classes (terpenoids, alkaloids, saturated and aromatic polyketides and other mixed metabolites) and recent synthetic methodologies allowing for atom and step economies. We also wish to include synthesis-based applied research or frontier topics dealing with the biological and medicinal development of naturally derived compounds, biosynthetic studies as well as the ecological role of natural products. Applicable aspects related to the biosynthesis, biological actions, medicinal properties, or drug discovery templates will be included in each contribution along with the synthetic efforts and related studies being reported.
Natural products have been designed by Nature for her own purpose. Hence, as privileged structures being capable of interacting to specific biological systems, they have always been a source of inspiration for the development of medicinally relevant scaffolds. Likewise, the science of synthesis, from methodological developments to total synthesis, has been stimulated by the various biological activities exhibited by natural products as well as their often challenging structures. These properties, which have been experimentally unveiled in laboratories, reflect the function of natural products in the environment. These functions explain the meaning of their existence and why living organisms are spending a lot of energy and matter to build, thank to specific machinery, often complex chemical architectures for the delight of organic chemists. Synthetic strategies are still evolving to get closer to the “ideal synthesis”, which takes into account new constraints such as atom-, step-, redox- and pot-economy. They have always been developed to help answer questions, improve the access to often rare compounds, improve their biological activity through diversity-oriented synthesis (DOS) or function-oriented synthesis (FOS) and understand their enzymatic origin through bio-inspired or biomimetic approaches.
The Frontiers Research Topic on Natural Product Synthesis will aim at merging original research and review articles by leading authors to provide readers with the very last advances in this field. It will cover all natural product classes (terpenoids, alkaloids, saturated and aromatic polyketides and other mixed metabolites) and recent synthetic methodologies allowing for atom and step economies. We also wish to include synthesis-based applied research or frontier topics dealing with the biological and medicinal development of naturally derived compounds, biosynthetic studies as well as the ecological role of natural products. Applicable aspects related to the biosynthesis, biological actions, medicinal properties, or drug discovery templates will be included in each contribution along with the synthetic efforts and related studies being reported.
