Unpicking natural product synthesis

artistic illustration of synthesis

Source: © Stuart Kinlough /I kon Images / Corbis

Is total synthesis in danger of a decline? Nina Notman investigates

Many natural products have three-dimensional structures containing a multitude of diverse functional groups and chiral centres, densely packed together. This can make it extremely challenging and time consuming to figure out how to remake them in the lab, armed with the tools of synthetic chemistry rather than nature’s enzymes.