Half-Century Journey from Synthetic Organic Chemistry to Mathematical Stereochemistry through Chemoinformatics

Total syntheses of colchicine in comparison: a journey through 50 years of synthetic organic chemistry.

Colchicine, the major alkaloid of the meadow saffron, is one of the most prominent natural products and, like other tubulin-binding natural products (e.g. taxol and the epothilones), exhibits great pharmaceutical potential. The first syntheses in the late 1950s were milestones in natural product synthesis. But even today this structurally supposedly simple molecule poses a challenge to syntheti...

Synthetic Organic Chemistry

Synthetic biology: lessons from the history of synthetic organic chemistry.

The mid-nineteenth century saw the development of a radical new direction in chemistry: instead of simply analyzing existing molecules, chemists began to synthesize them--including molecules that did not exist in nature. The combination of this new synthetic approach with more traditional analytical approaches revolutionized chemistry, leading to a deep understanding of the fundamental principl...

From Atoms to Crystals: a Mathematical Journey

We present an overview of some works on the models of computational quantum chemistry. We examine issues such as the existence of ground states (both for the electronic structure and the configuration of nuclei), the foundations of the models of the crystalline phase, and the macroscopic limits. We emphasize the connections between the physical modelling, the numerical concerns and the mathemat...

Boroxine Chemistry: from Fundamental Studies to Applications in Supramolecular and Synthetic Organic Chemistry

Organoboroxine chemistry has recently received much attention because the boroxine formation reaction is a powerful tool for the construction of organized architectures. The reversible nature of this reaction may result in new materials that possess unprecedented levels of structural organization due to facilitation through self-correction, and switchable properties can be imparted by the react...

Non-Mathematical Problem Solving in Organic Chemistry

Differences in problem-solving ability among organic chemistry graduate students and faculty were studied within the domain of problems that involved the determination of the structure of a molecule from the molecular formula of the compound and a combination of IR and H NMR spectra. The participants’ performance on these tasks was compared across variables that included amount of research expe...