Making natural products from renewable feedstocks: back to the roots?

Abstract

This review highlights the utilization of biomass-derived building blocks in the total synthesis of natural products.

Terpenes and Terpenoids: Building Blocks to Produce Biopolymers

“…By no means these multifunctional molecules and are strong candidates to become platform chemicals. However [68,69], one area that has been less explored is their use as monomers [70] to create bio-based polymers and copolymers. This is surprising, as some polyterpenes have been known for a long time such as the case of natural rubber (cis-1,4-polyisoprene) which is a natural terpene-based polymer.…”

Xylochemicals and where to find them

“…[50][51] Scheme 4: Chitin/Chitosan-derived starting material 22 and products thereof by Sperry et al [59,268] Nevertheless, nitrogen-containing fine chemicals remain a challenging task for xylochemical synthesis approaches, as they are not directly attainable from lignocellulosic biomass. To this end, the Sperry group has used chitin (20), the second-most abundant biopolymer, as a cheap natural source of nitrogen, to show a proofof-concept synthesis of the anticancer alkaloid proximicin A (23) in seven steps. [59] Additionally, all of the reagents applied in this synthesis sequence are traceable back towards renewable resources.…”

“…[15][16][17][18][19] Even though the earliest available sources for pure organic compounds were animals, microorganisms and plants, the 19 th and 20 th century were dominated by the exploitation of fossil carbon sources for the emerging chemical industry. [20][21] Since the last 30 years, the need for renewable resources and especially for alternative carbon atom sources is constantly growing, displaying one of the major aspects of the field of Green Chemistry. One approach within this topic is to use wood as such a renewable alternative ('Xylochemistry'), as it can be considered a source of atmospherically-bound CO 2 , and can be counted as CO 2 -neutral when no further fossil carbon is involved.…”

Recent Advances in Construction of Polycyclic Natural Product Scaffolds via One-Pot Reactions Involving Alkyne Annulation

“…The robustness of the reactions, especially the tolerance of air and water should also be taken into account, which will increase operational convenience especially for one-pot multistage reactions (Collins and Glorius, 2013;Zheng and Hua, 2014b;Chen et al, 2019). Also, more concern should be paid for the overall sustainability of the synthetic sequences including the renewability of the starting materials (Kühlborn et al, 2020). Furthermore, one-pot reactions, along with the preparation of substrates and post-functionalization, can be combined with flow chemistry and integrated into automatic syntheses (Jürjens et al, 2015;Coley et al, 2019;Bloemendal et al, 2020;Chatterjee et al, 2020;Nam et al, 2020), which should have new opportunities to further improvement of synthetic efficiency.…”