# Bioinspired total syntheses of natural products: a personal adventure

**Authors:** Zhengyi Qin, Yuting Yang, Nuran Yan, Xinyu Liang, Zhiyu Zhang, Yaxuan Duan, Huilin Li, Xuegong She

PMC · DOI: 10.3762/bjoc.21.160 · 2025-10-09

## TL;DR

This paper reviews bioinspired total syntheses of natural products, showcasing how biosynthetic pathways guide efficient synthetic strategies.

## Contribution

The paper presents recent achievements in bioinspired synthesis of diverse natural products and provides practical insights for applying this strategy.

## Key findings

- Bioinspired synthesis of diterpenoids like chabranol and monocerin was successfully achieved.
- Alkaloid and gymnothelignan syntheses demonstrated the versatility of the bioinspired approach.
- The study offers a detailed overview of strategy development for natural product synthesis.

## Abstract

Bioinspired total synthesis represents an important concept to guide the designing of powerful synthetic strategies. Our group has a long-time interest and experience in designing synthetic strategies through analyzing the biosynthetic pathway of natural products. Recently, we have achieved an array of bioinspired total syntheses, which showed the great power of this approach in natural product synthesis. Documented herein is a review of these achievements which include the detailed process of how we develop these strategies. Specifically, bioinspired total synthesis of three types of natural products, namely diterpenoids (chabranol, and monocerin), alkaloids (indole, hydroquinoline, and monoterpenoid−indolidinoid hybrid), and gymnothelignans are discussed. Based on these achievements on bioinspired total synthesis, we provide some information on how to use this important strategy in natural product synthesis.

## Full-text entities

- **Chemicals:** indole (MESH:C030374), monocerin (MESH:C485193), alkaloids (MESH:D000470), gymnothelignans (-), diterpenoids (MESH:D004224), chabranol (MESH:C545600)

## Figures

8 figures with captions in the complete paper: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12522158/full.md

---
Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12522158