Guided by evolution: from biology oriented synthesis to pseudo natural products

Abstract

Covering: up to 2020

Natural products (NPs) provide inspiration for the design of biologically active compounds and libraries. In this review, we cover several experimental and in silico approaches, which have been used to simplify NPs and guide NP-based library design. Earlier approaches, like the structural classification of natural products (SCONP) and biology-oriented synthesis (BIOS), focus on the identification of activity determining scaffolds and the synthesis of corresponding compound collections. More recently, NP fragments identified by means of cheminformatic analysis of the Dictionary of Natural Products (DNP) have been combined in unprecedented fashions to yield pseudo natural products (pseudo NPs), which show biological activities unrelated to the guiding NPs. Each approach was also the source of chemical innovation, in which synthetic methods were established for the rapid assembly of NP-inspired compounds and libraries.