| SYNTHESIS |
At the ACS ProSpectives conference, Zhu discussed the "substrate design" approach to MCRs--designing substrates with appropriate functional groups, so when the substrates are mixed together they will react in a highly ordered and productive fashion to produce an interesting scaffold in high yield. This approach contrasts with target-oriented synthesis, in which a natural product or other target compound is retrosynthetically disconnected into smaller and easily available synthons, and where the initial focus is thus more on the product than on the substrates. Zhu and coworkers recently used the substrate design strategy to develop multicomponent syntheses of a range of structurally distinct macrocycles and polyheterocycles
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