Total synthesis of selected natural products

Abstract: Natural products continue to provide ever-increasing challenges to synthetic chemists with their complex and sensitive structures. With proper selection, these challenges can be turned into wonderful opportunities to invent and discover new synthetic reactions, to design new strategies and to fashion novel molecular architectures. Developments in these areas often profoundly influence and shape the science of chemical synthesis, biology and medicine. In this article, a number of recent total syntheses of challenging natural substances from the authors's laboratories are highlighted