Total Synthesis of Complex Molecules

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With this award, the Chemical Synthesis program is supporting fundamental research of Professor Garg at the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Garg will pursue the chemical synthesis of several naturally occurring small molecules that possess challenging chemical structures and promising biological activities. The ability of scientists to build molecules with increased complexities, in a controlled and efficient manner, plays an important role across all of the fields that are impacted by chemical synthesis, such as drug discovery, agrochemistry, and materials science. Professor Garg will also continue his ongoing efforts to promote science to young people and the general public. This will be performed primarily through outreach activities and through initiatives that are intended to challenge existing paradigms in undergraduate education. The research involves an important class of indole alkaloids called the akuammilines. Over 30 molecules in this family have been isolated during the past century, all of which possess intricate chemical structures. However, relatively little progress has been made in the area of akuammiline alkaloid synthesis to date, especially in comparison to structural relatives such as the well-studied strychnos alkaloids. Professor Garg aims to establish a unified synthetic approach that will provide access to various structural subclasses of the akuammilines in an asymmetric fashion. In addition to delivering several akuammilines that have not been accessed previously, the proposed efforts will allow Garg's laboratory to probe the intricacies and complexities of late-stage transformations and establish the scope and limitations of synthetic methodologies, such as interrupted Fischer indolization reactions.