Recent Advances in the Field of Natural Product Synthesis: A Themed Issue in Honor of Professor Ari Mauri Petri Koskinen’s Retirement

Dear Colleagues,

Nature has been an invaluable source of medicines and traditional remedies since ancient times, which are mostly represented by herbs, animal products, and inorganic materials. Thanks to its biodiversity not only between animal and plant kingdoms but also among the various species, nature represents the largest library of compounds that has ever existed. In particular, medicinal plants represent a rich source of structurally diverse secondary metabolites, which can be exploited in the development of new clinically important compounds. Natural products feature enormous structural and chemical diversity that cannot be matched by any synthetic screening libraries and continue to remain the single most productive source of leads in modern drug discovery. The advent of new techniques in the separation, purification and characterization of novel compounds significantly improved the efficiency of these processes and, today, an important challenge is the generation of high-quality libraries of natural products that might allow the fast identification of lead compounds for drug discovery progression. In addition, the advent of powerful and user-friendly informatics tools for chemistry and biology further promoted the revolution of natural product screening in drug discovery. In the field of natural products research, organic chemistry has played a pivotal role, and the development of efficient, high-yielding, versatile, and innovative synthetic approaches allowed the production of natural products in quantities that otherwise would be inaccessible from natural sources, enabling more thorough biological evaluation. Indeed, accessing new chemical entities while retaining the biological relevance of natural chemotypes is a fundamental goal in the design of novel bioactive compound libraries. The general concept behind this Special Issue is to describe the recent advances in the field of natural product synthesis. In particular, it will gather the latest research trends in challenging organic synthesis of natural products, focusing on enantioselective synthesis, total synthesis, semisynthesis, biotransformation, and application of organic methodologies to total synthesis.

Prof. Dr. Bruno Botta
Prof. Dr. Trond Vidar Hansen
Guest Editors

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