TACOS · Terpenes via Asymmetric Catalytic One-Pot Synthesis: A Lifelong Training & Career Development Project

Terpenes via Asymmetric Catalytic One-Pot Synthesis: A Lifelong Training & Career Development Project

Terpenes are the largest class of secondary metabolites in plants (>30,000 known compounds) and play an important role as perfumes, spices, pheromones and medicines (e.g. limonene, safranal, germacrene, taxol). Though chemists have long sought to understand and simulate nature’s approach to the synthesis of terpenes. However, few reports have been made towards a synthetic equivalent of the enzymatic process. synthesis of simple terpenes by using organocatalysis. Organocatalysis, or the use of small organic molecules to catalyse organic transformations without any metal, is a relatively new and popular field within the domain of chiral molecule (or enantioselective) synthesis. Although chemical transformations that use organic catalysts, or organocatalysts, have been documented sporadically over the past century, it was not until the late 1990s that the field of organocatalysis was ‘born’, coalescing around a small number of articles that inspired an explosion of research (Figure 1). The success of this word is due to the notion of ‘green chemistry’ as opposed to ‘dirty’ organometallic chemistry, thus defining a politically correct aspect of chemistry. It is clear that there is a lot of interest in organocatalysis not only from academia but also from industry. To achieve its objectives, TACOS has produced research results of high quality and subsequently published them in top international conferences and journals : • TACOS has proposed novel ways to perform deshydrative transformations of alcohols, the key-step in terpene's synthesis, • The research results of TACOS facilitated the launch of two new projects aimed at developping new type of organocatalyst and a new method of catalyst discovery by applying the principles of dynamic combinatorial chemistry (DCC).

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