Nature's repertoire of biosynthetic transformations has recently been recognized to include the Diels-Alder cycloaddition reaction. Evidence now exists that there are enzymes that mediate the Diels-Alder reaction in secondary metabolic biosynthetic pathways. 2002 marked the 100th anniversary of Alder's birth and 75 years since the discovery of the Diels-Alder reaction. It would appear that livi...

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Since the early 1990’s the general and financial management of the Victorian public sector has been significantly transformed. This research constructs and explains the content, nature and quality of non-financial disclosures, including those related to performance indicators via a disclosure indicator analysis (DIA) of actual reporting practices in recent Government Budget papers. It reports t...

Emerging trends in drug discovery are prompting a renewed interest in natural products as a source of chemical diversity and lead structures. However, owing to the structural complexity of many natural compounds, the synthesis of derivatives is not easily realized. Here, we demonstrate a conceptually new approach using oligonucleotides as aptameric protective groups. These block several functio...

The cortistatins are a recently identified class of marine natural products characterized by an unusual steroidal skeleton, which have been found to inhibit differentially the proliferation of various mammalian cells in culture by an unknown mechanism. We describe a comprehensive route for the synthesis of cortistatins from a common precursor, which in turn is assembled from two fragments of si...

A synthesis of the originally proposed 2-(1 H-indol-3-yl)-4 H-3,1-benzoxazin-4-one structure of the alkaloid cephalandole A (1) led to a structural revision, and the isolated natural product has now been identified as the previously known compound 3-(1 H-indol-3-yl)-2 H-1,4-benzoxazin-2-one (7). The structural assignment was corroborated by detailed NMR studies. A short synthesis of the related...

All-carbon quaternary stereocenters have posed significant challenges in the synthesis of complex natural products. These important structural motifs have inspired the development of broadly applicable palladium-catalyzed asymmetric allylic alkylation reactions of unstabilized non-biased enolates for the synthesis of enantioenriched α-quaternary products. This microreview outlines key considera...

Carbohydrates and natural products serve essential roles in nature, and also provide core scaffolds for pharmaceutical agents and vaccines. However, the inherent complexity of these molecules imposes significant synthetic hurdles for their selective functionalization and derivatization. Nature has, in part, addressed these issues by employing enzymes that are able to orient and activate substra...