Mini-Reviews in Organic Chemistry - Volume 18, Issue 3, 2021

Marine mollusks are a prolific source of secondary metabolites with complex/diverse structures and various aspects of biological activities. For the above-mentioned reason, these animals have been extensively explored and have become the hotspot of the research subject in recent years. It is well documented that mollusks can escape from predation by utilizing bioactive metabolites as defensive chemicals. In the last decade, the possible diet relationship between the South China Sea mollusks and their related potential prey organisms, including sponges, corals, algae, etc. has been systematically investigated. A series of interesting results have been obtained concerning the chemistry, chemoecology, and pharmacological profiles of the studied marine organisms. The present review focuses on recent developments dealing with chemistry, chemoecology, and bioactivity of the South China Sea mollusks and their dietary organisms.

Enzyme-catalyzed cascade reactions have attracted an increasing attention with many advantages, such as environmental protection, high efficiency and no need for intermediate purification. The present overview has summarized enzymatic cascade benefit systems, including double-enzyme, multi-enzyme, and chemical-enzyme catalytic one-pot reactions. With the continuous developments in protein engineering, metabolic engineering, synthetic biology and systems biocatalysis, multi-step biotransformations will expand the scope of application, as well as enhance the biocatalytic efficiency.

Mimosa pudica Linn is an integrated part of the Traditional Medicines Systems of India, China, Africa, Korea and America. It has been used for centuries in traditional medicines to cure different diseases like fever, diabetes, constipation, jaundice, ulcers, biliousness, and dyspepsia. It is an essential ingredient of a wide class of herbal formulations. To assess the scientific evidence for therapeutic potential of Mimosa pudica Linn and to identify the gaps for future research, the available information on the ethno-medicinal uses, phytochemistry, pharmacology and toxicology of Mimosa pudica Linn was collected via a library and electronic searches in Sci-Finder, PubMed, Science Direct, Google Scholar for the period, 1990 to 2020. In traditional medicinal systems, a variety of ethno- medicinal applications of Mimosa pudica Linn have been noticed. Phytochemical investigation has resulted in the identification of 40 well known chemical constituents, among which alkaloids, phenols and flavionoids are the predominant groups. The crude extracts and isolates have exhibited a wide spectrum of in vitro and in vivo pharmacological activities including anti-cancer, antiinflammation, osteoporosis, neurological disorders, hypertension, etc. To quantify the Mimosa pudica Linn and its formulations, analytical techniques like HPLC and HPTLC have shown dominancy with a good range of recovery and detection limit. Mimosa pudica Linn is the well-known herb since ancient time. The pharmacological results supported some of the applications of Mimosa pudica Linn in traditional medicine systems. Perhaps, the predominance of alkaloids, phenols and flavionoids are responsible for the pharmacological activities the crude extracts and isolates of Mimosa pudica Linn. Further, there is a need to isolate and evaluate the active chemical constituents of Mimosa pudica Linn having significant medicinal values. In the future, it is important to study the exact mechanism associated with the phytochemicals of Mimosa pudica Linn especially on anti-cancer activities. Notably, toxicity studies on Mimosa pudica Linn are limited, which are to be explored in the future for the safe application of Mimosa pudica Linn and its formulations.

Thioaurones are known for more than one hundred years; however, they are relatively less studied. In some way, due to their appealing as a candidate of photoswitchable molecules, they have led to generating considerable interest in the last years. In this literature survey, we report and discuss the recent advancements made in the synthesis, reactivity and applications of the thioaurone derivatives. To a great extent, the review summarizes published works from different databases since 2005.

China primarily contains medium and low-grade phosphorus ores that are used to produce phosphoric acid. Here, we provide an overview of phosphoric acid production processes, including wet, thermal, and Kiln methods, as well as the fundamental principles, major equipment, and technological aspects of each process. Progress in the Kiln method using low-grade phosphate rock is described, which involves the KPA and CDK processes. The literature shows that the addition of admixtures adds great competitiveness to Kiln phosphate production methods and has considerable development prospects.

Haloamination (or called aminohalogenation) upon the C-C unsaturated bonds is an important amino functionalization, which can introduce the halogen atoms accompanying with the amino groups into the substrate backbones in a tandem manner. Over the past two decades, it has drawn increasing attention due to its versatile applications. In this review, we will mainly focus on the synthetic strategies anchoring the intermolecular haloamination reactions achieved in the past few years. Limited by the length of the context, the intramolecular haloamination and the applications of the vicinal haloamines will not be involved.

At present, due to increased costs, decreased productivity, and lack of breakthrough technologies, many pharmaceutical firms face various challenges in their research and development projects. A variety of environmental concerns have also been gradually placing pressure on the pharmaceutical industry, including substantial profit losses due to patent expiration, more expensive health care facilities, and more stringent regulatory requirements. A system-oriented approach to finding innovative solutions is essential to this complicated problem. In our opinion, the key to solving these challenges is to increase the quality and number of creative and cost-effective new pharmaceutical products without incurring excessive R expenses, both for the future profitability of pharmaceutical industries and developments in healthcare. Our main emphasis is to highlight the strategies and models like Quality by Design, Lean Six Sigma, Organ-on-Chip, Chorus, AI, and so on in delivering innovations, which can be a good positive change for industries as to increase productivity in terms of time efficiency and innovation as well. These models focus on the creation and diffusion of knowledge internal to the firms. The major focus points should include critical investigation in innovations where the risk is high, as this can lead to the safer side of the development. We then propose specific strategies that could have the most substantial impact on improving R productivity. Besides this, the selection of strategy and models at the same point is as important as its implementation and its accurate selection can assist pharmaceutical companies to improve R organizations and their productivity.

Benzoxazoles are an important class of the heterocyclic compound and display a wide range of pharmacological activities and other applications. Due to their varied application, they are always an important moiety for synthetic chemists to develop newer methodologies for their synthesis. In this review, an attempt has been made to briefly describe and summarize all of the available methods for the preparation of benzoxazoles, and their substitutes as well as also discuss their functionlization.