“…Many natural products or their derivatives have been demonstrated to have extensive antitumor activities by inducing apoptosis ( Chen et al, 2015 ; Liu et al, 2015 ; Padmaja et al, 2015 ; Bailly, 2020 ; Greco et al, 2021 ) and inhibiting mitosis ( Thomas et al, 2016 ; Davison and Sperry, 2017 ; Yokoyama et al, 2019 ). As an important class of aromatic heterocyclic compounds, carbazole alkaloid derivatives have long been used in medicinal chemistry ( Murali et al, 2017 ; Sun et al, 2017 ; Zhou et al, 2018 ; Cao et al, 2019 ; Issa et al, 2019 ; Liu et al, 2019 ; Rassias et al, 2019 ; Liu et al, 2020 ; Liu et al, 2021 ; Wang et al, 2022 ), agrochemicals ( Kong et al, 2016 ; Wang et al, 2017 ; Dang et al, 2018 ; Sun et al, 2020 ; Xie et al, 2020 ) and other fields. So, how to realize the functional modification of carbazole ring to improve its activity is always an important research direction.…”