Themed collection Synthetic strategies for mining the information-rich content of natural products

The Natural Product Reports themed collection on Synthetic Strategies for Mining the Information-Rich Content of Natural Products for Biology and Medicine is introduced by the Guest Editors, Daniel Romo and Christopher D. Vanderwal.

Cheminformatic analyses illustrate that drugs from natural product-based and synthetic origins have distinctive structural and physicochemical features. These drugs also cluster by biosynthetic origin and, to some extent, by therapeutic class.

Incorporating natural product-like features within small-molecule screening collections is of great interest. We highlight an emerging strategy that achieves this goal by using abundant natural products as starting points for compound construction.

Paxilline indole diterpenes have fascinated chemists for the past several decades. This review highlights the diversity of strategies and tactics that have been employed in the corresponding area of organic synthesis, from inception to the present.

This review recounts the chemical journey from 2015 to 2020 that culminated in the structure elucidation of the elusive bacterial metabolite, colibactin.

This review summarizes and highlights recent advances in medicinal chemistry of natural products enabled by total synthesis that provide “supernatural products” with improved properties superseding the natural products themselves.

Various synthetic strategies have been developed to explore natural products as an enduring source of chemical information useful for probing biological relevant chemical space and impacting drug discovery.

This review provides an overview and historical context to two concepts for the design of natural product-inspired compound libraries and highlights the used synthetic methodologies.

Chemical syntheses of the salvinorin chemotype analyzed through the lens of chemical space navigation.

Synthetic and medicinal chemistry are important tools in the development of more potent, more accessible, or more pharmacologically favorable derivatives of anti-biofilm natural products, in addition to facilitating structure confirmation and understanding of mechanistic pathways.

This review article summarises a series of total syntheses of natural and designed molecules primarily for biology and medicine. Aspects of new synthetic strategies and methods and optimisation of biological properties are emphasised.