Covering: July 2010 to June 2012. Previous review: Nat. Prod. Rep., 2011, 28, 1126-1142. Recent progress on the isolation, identification, biological activity and synthetic studies of structurally diverse alkaloids from plants of the family Amaryllidaceae is summarized in this review. In addition, the structurally related alkaloids isolated from Sceletium species are discussed as well.

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Recent progress on the isolation, identification, biological activity and synthetic studies of Amaryllidaceae alkaloids, as well as the structurally close alkaloids from the Sceletium genus, published from July 2015 to June 2017 are reviewed.

Alkaloids from the plants of Amaryllidaceae family consists of an unique class of nitrogen-containing compounds showing diverse and significant biological activities, including anticancer and acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibitory activities. This review summarizes the research into the isolation, structure elucidation, biological activity, and chemical aspects of the Amaryllidaceae alkaloids over the last two years. In addition, structurally closely related Sceletium alkaloids are also discussed.

Pd-catalyzed β-C–H functionalizations of carboxylic acid derivatives using an auxiliary as a directing group have been extensively explored in the past decade. In comparison to the most widely used auxiliaries in asymmetric synthesis, the simplicity and practicality of the auxiliaries developed for C–H activation remains to be improved. We previously developed a simple N-methoxyamide auxiliary to direct β-C–H activation, albeit this system was not compatible with carboxylic acids containing α-hydrogen atoms. Herein we report the development of a pyridine-type ligand that overcomes this limitation of the N-methoxyamide auxiliary, leading to a significant improvement of β-arylation of carboxylic acid derivatives, especially α-amino acids. The arylation using this practical auxiliary is applied to the gram-scale syntheses of unnatural amino acids, bioactive molecules and chiral bis(oxazoline) ligands.