Truth in structue – Quicker ways to natural product structures that don't require correction

Structure determination for natural products has been revolutionized by the advance of NMR technology and application of innovative experimental techniques. Notably, it is possible to obtain structures from small amounts of material that are not accessible to single crystal X-ray diffraction. Still, the interpretation of this data can be arduous, requires great expertise, and is error-prone. Of course, other techniques are used to confirm structures as well: synthetic reproduction of natural products has a long tradition of success in the elucidation of molecules containing intricate elements, including multiple stereo centers. However, despite rigorous analysis by qualified chemists, these methods still sometimes arrive at erroneous results^{1 – 5}.

Astute application of modern technology can speed the rate at which structures are solved, while also vastly reducing errors that result either from synthetic methods or from unassisted analysis of instrumental data. Computer Assisted Structure Elucidation (CASE) has developed over the past decades to relieve the burden of work in proving correct structures. In this presentation, we will discuss how CASE is used to objectively analyze complex sets of NMR data in order to test structural hypotheses, conduct de novo structure elucidation, and query large databases of known structures for matches of already identified natural products.

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²Sakano, Y., et al. J. Antibiot. 57: 564 – 568, 2004.

³Oö mura, S. et al. Chem. Abstr. 141, 122412 m, 2004.

⁴Snider, B., Gao, X. Org. Letters, 7(20), 4419 – 4422, 2005.

⁵Kim, et al. Org. Letters, 15(1), 100 – 103, 2013.