WHAT DO WE COOK
Syntheses of Alkaloids accomplished till date
Synergistic/Dual Catalysis:
Being present as the second most abundant aromatics after benzene in various natural products, Aromatic heterocycles have drawn an immense attention in the synthetic community due to their wide array of reactivity. Despite seeing an exponential growth of reports in the past decade or so, still, functionalization of these have remained a daunting task. As a methodology driven group, we focus on making these important class of molecules using a combination of metal catalysis or Organocatalysis. Due to their added advantage as opposed to mono catalysis system, we are working on a various multi catalytic system to achieve this in a one-pot fashion. Later we apply this methodology to construct various natural products.
C-H Functionalization:
In the myriad of transition metal-catalyzed reactions, C–H bond functionalization is currently one of the frontier fields in the organic synthesis. A rapid development in this topic has been achieved during last few years and many powerful synthetic methods have been reported in the literature. Being very ubiquitous in most of the organic molecules, selective C–H bond functionalization is highly important as that can lead access to the functionalized compounds directly from the readily available precursors and hence save both costs as well as time. In this direction, our group is actively involved in developing new reaction methods based on transition metal catalyzed selective C–H bond activation reactions. We are mainly interested to work with directed C–H bond functionalization using transition metal catalysts based on cobalt and rhodium metals.
Chemistry of Carbazoles:
The carbazole structural motif is found in numerous natural products having interesting biological activities indicating its immense importance in medicinal chemistry. Despite several synthetic methods reported in the literature, synthesis of carbazoles with definite substitution pattern is still a major concern. More importantly synthesis of carbazole starting from readily available starting precursors in atom economical way is highly desirable.
Owing to the noteworthy utilities of this privileged heterocycle, we are currently working on developing efficient methods to generate this important class of heterocycle with diverse substitution patterns using easily available Brønsted acid catalyst. Our principal focus is to generate - i) one-pot, ii) protecting group free, iii) step and atom economic, iv) relatively cheap benzannulation protocols, in order to construct structurally unique carbazoles and cabazole alkaloids.
Organic Photovoltaics:
Polyacenes and their derivatives have served as promising materials for organic electronics. Incorporation of heteroatoms such as sulfur or nitrogen into the polyacene backbone increases the stability of the fused system originating from loss of linearity and provides sites for additional solubilizing and functional groups. Our focus in this research area is to design and synthesize heteroacene for the possible application in organic electronics.