Excellent Overview of all Aspects of Organic Chemistry Since 1998

European Journal of Organic Chemistry (EurJOC) has reached another milestone – publication of the 500th Microreview! The long-standing motto of the Microreviews is simple: quality not quantity, which considering the vast literature that chemists need to survey is clearly a worthy aim, but now there is a significant quantity too! Microreviews feature in almost every issue and give authors the opportunity to present their research in a succinct manner, but also to put it into the wider context of previous work by other authors and future prospects. A highly focused overview of a specific topic is no easy task and EurJOC is, therefore, very grateful to all of the contributors.

The 500th Microreview by Christelle Serba and Nicolas Winssinger is featured in issue 20 of EurJOC. The authors present a series of recent examples that illustrate the different strategies used to access either a diverse range of natural products, or libraries of compounds that are reminiscent of natural products, from a common intermediate. Branching out from a strategic intermediate takes its lead from nature in the sense that the same logic can be found in biosynthetic pathways. An example is the sesquiterpene biosynthesis, in which an acyclic precursor can be cyclized to give different products depending on the reagent used. The development of complexity-generating reactions and cascade reactions has resulted in great progress in this area enabling access not just to a single target, but to families of natural products.

Nicolas Winssinger is a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Geneva and his research interests are in the use of natural products as privileged pharmacological starting points for the development of probes to enable the further understanding of biology. Christelle Serba is currently working for her PhD on new approaches to sesquiterpene lactones in the Winssinger group.

All at EurJOC hope the success of the Microreviews feature continues and we look forward to receiving more contributions in the future.