Transition-metal catalyzed C–H activation as a means of synthesizing complex natural products

Abstract

Over the past few decades, the advent of C–H activation has led to a rethink among chemists about the synthetic strategies employed for multi-step transformations. Indeed, deploying innovative and masterful tricks against the numerous classical organic transformations has been the need of the hour. Despite this, the immense importance of C–H activation remains unfulfilled unless the methodology can be deployed for large-scale industrial processes and towards the concise, step-economic synthesis of prodigious natural products and pharmaceutical drugs. Lately, the growing potential of C–H activation methodology has indeed driven the pioneers of synthetic organic chemists into finding more efficient methods to accelerate the synthesis of such complex molecular scaffolds. This review aims to draw a general overview of the various C–H activation procedures that have been adopted for synthesizing these vast majority of structurally complicated natural products. Our objective lies in drawing a complete picture and taking the readers through the synthesis of a series of such complex organic compounds by simplified techniques, making it step-economic on a larger scale and thus instigating the readers to trigger the use of such methodology and uncover new, unique patterns for future synthesis of such natural products.