Novel sequential and biomimetic methods for polyketides: Total synthesis of Tuscolid/Tuscoron

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Dirk Menche
• Subject Area: Organic Molecular Chemistry - Synthesis and Characterisation
• Term: since 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 268933483

Polyketides are attractive synthetic targets due to high degrees of structural diversity and complexity in combination with a broad range of important biological functions. Aim of this research project is the development of novel - in comparison to known procedures more direct and effective - methods to synthesize polyketides by novel sequential processes, which allow for a rapid increase of structural complexity from simple building blocks by combination of several synthetic transformations in a one-pot fashion.These methods allow for efficient approaches to the structurally unique polyketides tuscolid and tuscorones, stereochemically complex and biologically active metabolites of myxobacterial origin. It is planned to synthesize the parent representatives of this class of natural products for the first time, also to unequivocally determine their exact three-dimensional structures and to enable further evaluation of the unusual biological profiles of these scarce natural products. Finally, motivated by their highly unusual biosyntheses adventurous biomimetic synthetic approaches will be pursued with the notion to discover novel and generally useful chemical methods.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants