Synthetic Studies on Natural Products

科学技术的进步越来越依赖于获得具有新特性的新材料。从制药行业的新药到电子行业的新设备，化学在新材料的设计和分子构造中发挥着重要作用。要建造与许多“设计师”材料相关的复杂结构，需要新的、更强大的合成策略。手性通常是一个在分子水平上很难控制的结构元素。尽管如此，手性的感觉可以对分子的性质，特别是生物活性产生深远的影响。例如，沙利度胺的一种手性形式是镇静剂，但另一种手性形式会导致出生缺陷；无法控制合成的手性形式意味着这两种形式都存在于上市药物中，并导致了众所周知的50‘S和60’S的悲剧。 目前的提议寻求设计、开发和展示一些新的、潜在的强大的合成策略，这些策略将允许在分子水平上绝对控制手性形式的新材料的构建。为了实施这些策略，将需要开发新的化学工艺，以促进生产所需材料所需的精确“分子手术”。预计这项研究将带来有用的技术，以有效地建造具有复杂结构和重要/有用性能的新(或稀有)材料。

Increasingly, advances in science and technology depend on access to new materials with new properties. Chemistry has a major role to play in the design and molecular construction of new materials ranging from new drugs in the pharmaceutical industry to new devices for the electronics industry. To build the sophisticated structures associated with many of these "designer" materials requires new and more powerful synthetic strategies. Chirality is often a particularly difficult structural element to control at the molecular level. Nonetheless, the sense of chirality can have a profound influence on molecular properties, particularly biological activity. For example, one of the chiral forms of thalidomide is a sedative but the other chiral form causes birth defects; the inability to control the chiral form synthesized meant that both forms were present in the marketed drug and led to the well-known tragedy of the 50's and 60's. The current proposal seeks to design, develop, and demonstrate some new and potentially powerful synthetic strategies that will allow the construction of new materials with absolute control over the chiral form at the molecular level. To implement such strategies will require the development of new chemical processes that facilitate the precise "molecular surgery" required to produce the desired materials. It is anticipated that this research will lead to useful technology for the efficient construction of new (or rare) materials with sophisticated structures and important/useful properties.