Biomimetic organic synthesis transposes the efficiency of nature's chemistry into the laboratory. Natural products (also known as secondary metabolites) are among the best examples of how nature can assemble atoms into highly complex structures. Therefore, biomimetic total syntheses of natural products (in which biosynthesis considerations guide the synthetic strategy) constitute the major focus of this book, with emphasis on the developments of the last 10 to 15 years. Important key definitions and general concepts are described in a tutorial way and additional chapters develop some frontier fields that may benefit to or from biomimetic synthesis. The book has been organized according to the main biosynthetic pathways:
Volume 1: alkaloids derived from ornithine, arginine, lysine, tyrosine, tryptophane; manzamine alkaloids; pyrrole-2-aminoimidazole and guanidinium alkaloids; peptide alkaloids; alkaloids with a non-amino acid origin.
Volume 2: Terpenoids and polyprenylated compounds; polyketides: aromatic, non aromatic, polyethers, electrocyclization pathways, lignans, resveratrol-derived and tannin polyphenols; frontiers in biomimetic organic synthesis: Diels-Alderases, transfer hydrogenations, life's single chirality, artifacts in natural product chemistry.
This two-volume book is made up of 24 contributions from 33 authors. Graduate students, teachers and researchers in the fields of organic and bio-organic chemistry, who enjoy total syntheses, synthetic strategies and biosyntheses, will be the happy users of this book.
About the Author
Erwan Poupon is a pharmacist, he obtained his PhD in organic chemistry under the supervision of Dr. Nicole Kunesch and Prof. Henri-Philippe Husson in 2000 at Paris-Descartes University. He was subsequently a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California at San Diego working with Prof. Emmanuel Theodorakis. He then joined the faculty at the School of Pharmacy of Paris-Sud University where he is now Professor of pharmacognosy and natural product chemistry. His fields of interest relate to the chemistry of natural products, including biomimetic synthesis and chemical biology.
Bastien Nay obtained his diploma of Pharmacy in 1998 and his PhD in organic chemistry in 2000 under the guidance of Prof. Joseph Vercauteren at the School of Pharmacy of Bordeaux, France. He then joined Prof. J. Stephen Clark's group as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Nottingham, UK. In 2003 he was appointed research scientist at the CNRS, now working and teaching at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, where he is managing the natural product chemistry team. His research interests non only concern the synthetic strategies towards natural products, but also their origin and raion d'etre.
