Diversity-Oriented Organic Synthesis

1Introduction A goal of chemical genetics is to find small molecules that modulate the individual functions of gene products with high potency and high specificity[1,2]. Natural products and natural product-derived compounds provide many of the most striking examples, particularly in terms of their specificity. It seems unlikely that natural products alone will provide the hypothetical "complete" set of small molecules that would allow the functions of all proteins, as well as their individual domains, to be determined. For chemistry to have its maximal effect on biology, efficient methods based on diversity-oriented organic synthesis for discovering this set of small molecules are in great demand(See Fig. 1).