Success and Failure (or Success?): Short Stories in Natural Product Total Synthesis

Craig M. Williams

School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences,

University of Queensland, Brisbane, 4072, Queensland, Australia

E-mail: c.williams3@uq.edu.au

Figure 1

Natural products offer a wonderful opportunity to provide student training and stimulate academic learning. Often, however, natural product total synthesis projects do not reach fruition (i.e. total synthesis of the target) for exemplar reasons such as literature chemistry failing to deliver, or simply because the chemical methodology is currently unavailable to achieve the desired transformation (i.e. functional group interconversion). The adventures of working on the above targets (Figure 1) highlight these points and as such the lecture will detail successful and unsuccessful encounters along with the development of a variety of organometallic reagents used to address these situations.

Acknowledgment: The authors thank the University of Queensland, EcoBiotics Pty Ltd, CSIRO and the Australian Research Council for financial support.