Synthesis and Characterization of 2-Hydroxychalcones

Chalcones are known to be anti-bacterial, anti-microbial, anti-HIV, anticancer, anti-malarial, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and anti-viral agents. They are a class of compounds that have chemical activities that activate biological pathways in order to inhibit carcinogenesis. They are also known to have cancer chemopreventive properties. Cancer chemoprevention is the use of natural and synthetic molecules to inhibit the process of carcinogenesis. A chalcone can undergo 1,4-Michael addition with soft nucleophiles through it\u27s enone system. Many biological systems utilize the Michael addition to activate chemopreventive pathways and anticancer responses 2 . In this work, 2-hydroxychalcones were of interest because they have increased 1,4-Michael acceptor activities. The 2-hydroxy substituent is able to hydrogen bond with the carbonyl oxygen of the enone system in order to increase the compound\u27s reactivity toward soft nucleophiles. The 2-hydroxychalcones that were synthesized using several types of aldol condensation reactions. Using various derivatives of synthesized chalcones , we have increased the free radical scavenging ability in the compounds in order to improve chemoprevention. Synthesized compounds were characterized via 1 H-NMR