Designing organic syntheses

The synthetic pathway for a drug or analogue must start with readily available materials and convert them by a series of inexpensive reactions into the target compound. There are no obvious routes as each compound will present a different challenge. The usual approach is to work back from the target structure in a series of steps until cheap commercially available materials are found. This approach is formalized by a method developed by S Warren, which is known as either the disconnection approach or retrosynthetic analysis. In all cases the final pathway should contain a minimum of stages, in order to keep costs to a minimum and overall yields to a maximum. 

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To develop a practical tool that can help the chemist to design organic syntheses. 

S. Warren, "Designing Organic Syntheses. A Programmed Introduction to the Synthon Approach", John Wiley Sons, Chichester, 1978. 

For highly functionalised dienes and their equivalents, also very useful for designing organic syntheses involving cycloaddition and cyclocondensation reactions, see S. Danishefsky, CHEMTRACTS Organic Chemistry, 1989, 2, 273-297. 

The program CHAOS has been mainly developed as a didactic tool i.e., as a heuristic aid for designing organic syntheses in such a manner that the student may use it, at his own pace, at different levels following the heuristic principles and methodologies developed in the present book. Two versions of CHAOS, one for IBM PCs (or "fully compatible" PCs) with Windows 3.1 or later, and another one for Macintosh computers are available. A summary of some of the main improvements of the present versions follows ... 

Try to elaborate "synthesis trees" of most of the exercises found in Warren s book "Designing Organic Syntheses. A Programmed Introduction to the Synthon Approach" (John Wiley Sons, Chichester, 1978) and compare the different synthetic sequences with the solutions proposed therein. 

This is exemplified by EROS, a system that can predict the course of chemical reactions or can design organic syntheses. 

An excellent approach can be found in S. Warren, Designing Organic Syntheses, a Programmed Introduction to the Synthon Approach, Wiley, New York, 1978. 

Warren, S. (1978). Designing organic syntheses, p.150-172. Wiley, Chichester. 

This programme is now only part of a comprehensive package on designing organic syntheses my textbook Organic Synthesis The Disconnection Approach1 and its companion... 

Accompanying the main text is a workbook which gives further worked examples for each chapter, problems, and solutions. Designing organic syntheses is a skill you can learn only with instruction and practice. It is essential that you try problems from the workbook as you go along so that you can discover whether you understand each chapter. My programmed book may help you with the core of the work the examples in it are mostly different from those in this book. 

S. Warren, Designing Organic Syntheses, Wiley, Chichester, i978. 

I hope the book will. stimulate the chemists to explore, further, the potential of R-R-9-BBN intermediates for developing new synthetic methodologies and in designing organic syntheses. It is my opinion that organization of topics of the book will attract advanced organic chemistry students, industrial and academic chemists. 

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