Planning from the Target Structure

The benefits one gains from a judicious selection of starting compounds may not always be easy to achieve in practice. More often than not the analysis of a truly complicated molecule does not reveal the structural prompts that provide immediate leads for identifying appropriate starting compounds and pathways for their conversion into the target material. 

Retrosynthetic analysis involves several more or less distinct steps probably the most difficult, and by far the most important, is the initial analysis of the synthetic target structure. 

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