Natural Product Inspired Scaffolds Designs

Dear Colleagues,

The Special Issue on “Natural Product Inspired Scaffold Designs” intends to bring together some wonderful ideas, offering natural product-derived or natural products-based molecular architectures either through or for a synthesis project. Natural products have been an immensely useful source of drug candidates, as well as a great motivation for the chemists to realize laboratory access to them. Diverse forms of life have created and improved the chemical entities through the evolution and optimized them for their physiological requirements that help them cope with some of the toughest of environments. Biological relevance of the molecular frameworks of these natural products is an open secret that remains underexplored and calls to exploit the potential of natural scaffolds to deliver novel modulators of diverse biological functions. Concise synthesis strategies that employ few synthetic steps, by incorporating domino or cascade reactions, as well as one-pot multicomponent reactions, provide highly efficient access to natural product-based structural complexity. The state-of-art chemical transformations, for instance, C–H activations, that can modify a highly complex natural product or its analogues, have recently seen a surge in their applications towards building natural product-like small molecules. Natural product-core structures can either be the target or the starting points in the synthesis journey to create novel chemical matter. A known biological target of a natural product ligand can also offer important structural insights and help in designing novel scaffolds towards better inhibitors, activators or binders of the same target. Therefore, chem- and bioinformatics approaches with their power to predict biological targets for various molecular scaffolds based on natural products are important and desired contributions to advance this field of research. Biological screenings and evaluation of the compound collections developed around natural product core scaffolds provides the necessary medicinal or biological direction to a class of small molecules and depict the first stage of the journey of a novel natural product based chemical entity to become a drug or a tool candidate.
In conclusion, this Special Issue embodies the chemistry around natural product core frameworks or scaffolds, and the applications of the small molecules based on natural scaffolds in biological and material sciences. We hope that the contributions will be able to garner your attention and will further empower the scientific community to take full advantage of nature’s tool box.

Dr. Kamal Kumar
Guest Editor