Vol. 26 No. 5
September-October 2004

Heterocyclic Chemistry

by Tom Tidwell

Photograph (L to R): Ramaiah Muthyala (Univ. of Minnesota, USA), Ramesh Chandra (Bundelkhand University, India), Alan Katritzky (Conference Organizer, Univ. of Florida, Gainsville, Fl, USA), Chris Stevens (Univ. of Ghent, Belgium), and Suhas Pednekar (Ramnarain Ruia College, India).

The 5th Florida Heterocyclic Conference was held 8-10 March 2004 at the University of Florida in Gainesville. The conference, which attracted over 170 delegates, featured 11 plenary lectures, 11 short lectures, a short course on heterocyclic chemistry taught by Alan Katritzky and Dan Comins, and a workshop on microwave-assisted synthesis. The attendees, many of whom are chemists in the industrial sector, represented many different countries spanning five different continents.

Heterocyclic compounds play a major role in the pharmaceutical industry and in other applications, which accounts for the great interest in the subject. Microwave-assisted synthesis is relevant to all aspects of synthetic organic chemistry, and is gaining increased popularity because of its ability to speed up and simplify synthetic reactions at low cost.

The plenary lectures were as follows:
• Jeremy Sanders (University of Cambridge, UK), “Dynamic Combinatorial Chemistry: New Opportunities for Molecular Recognition and Catalysis”
• Guy Quéguiner (University of Rouen, France), “Synthesis and reactions of Organometallics of Pyridines, Quinolines, and Diazines”
• Al Padwa (Emory University, USA), “Cascade Processes for Alkaloid Synthesis”
• John Macor (Bristol-Myers Squibb, USA), “Heterocyclic Organic Chemistry as the Driving Force Behind the Discovery of Novel GPRR (G-protein Coupled Receptor) Ligands”
• John Armstrong (Merck, USA), “Efficient Synthesis of a Neurokinin Acceptor (NKI) Antagonist”
• Charles Rees (Imperial College, UK), “Multiatom Heterocyclic Chemistry”
• Thomas Tidwell (University of Toronto, Canada), “New reactivity of Pyridines and Piperidines”
• Anthony Czarnik (USA), “Reversible Heterocycle Formation as a Signally Mechanism in Glucose Chemosensors”
• Lutz Tietze (University of Goettingen, Germany), “Domino Reactions in the Synthesis of Heterocyclic Natural products and Analogues”
• Paul Ornstein (Eli Lilly, USA), “Adventures in Drug Discovery”
• Jonathan Ellman (University of California, USA), “New Methods for Carbon-Carbon Bond Formation in the Synthesis of Nitrogen Heterocycles”

A selection of the plenary lectures will be published in Pure and Applied Chemistry. The 6th FlotHet is being planned, as usual, for Gainesville, Florida, USA, for 27 February to 2 March 2005.