γ-Pyrone natural products-A privileged compound class provided by nature

In Biology Oriented Synthesis (BIOS), the inherent biological relevance of natural products is employed for the design and synthesis of compound libraries. Towards this end, library generation in BIOS is focused on compound classes from biologically relevant space such as the natural product space or also the drug space and only scaffolds of these areas of proven relevance are employed for synthesis of small focused libraries with limited diversity. We here present a short overview of gamma-pyrone natural products, highlighting their biological properties and their potential applicability in a BIOS of a compound library. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.