Zhang, Chen, Chen, Xie. ACIEE, 2011, 51, 1024. DOI: 10.1002/anie.201106587  
Second time around for Stenine on TotallySynthetic - the first synthesis I blogged takes us back to 2008, and Aube’s neat work focusing around a tandem Diels-Alder / Schmidt reaction. This latest publication moves the research to Kunming, China, the home of it’s use as part of Chinese herbal medicine.  That doesn’t alter the core of the synthetic strategy, though, as Hongbin Zhang seems to agree with Aube that building the cyclohexane core first is the key to this target.
Zhang, however, prefers the use of a …

Fukuyama, Toma, Kita. JACS, 2010, ASAP. DOI: 10.1021/ja103721s
Ah – now this is a bit of a blast-from-the-past.  I knew I’d written something about this molecule before, so I had a quick rummage in the Tot. Syn. folder on my PC – and found nothing.  So I had a look in the other Tot. Syn folder, and another place I keep stuff for this website, and then four or five other places… (yeah, great filing system here) …and it turned up in this presentation I wrote a life-time ago.  You can …

Magnus, Sane, Fauber, Lynch. JACS, 2009, ASAP. DOI: 10.1021/ja9085534.
I don’t think we’ve covered many targets I’ve actually ingested; and I’ve done most of the family too.  The morphine was a bit ‘meh’, as I was so out-of-it I couldn’t really appreciate it.  But the dihydrocodine was the good-stuff – really took the edge off my pluracy.  However, the withdrawal symptoms were kinda harsh.  Other members of this historic family of natural products include galanthamine and narwedine, neither of which I’ve encountered before.  Philip Magnus has, though, as …