Tohru Fukuyama, of Nagoya University's Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, will deliver a seminar entitled, "Synthetic Studies on Tetrodotoxin." Hosted by Dirk Trauner.
For more information about the speaker, click here.
Abstract: Tetrodotoxin (TTX) is one of the most famous marine natural products, which is found most notably in the liver and ovary of puffer fish. It is the toxin responsible for the fatal food poisoning caused by improperly cooked puffer fish in Japan. This compound also serves as an important biochemical tool in neurophysiology since it exhibits neurotoxicity by selectively blocking sodium channels of excitable cell membranes. Despite its relatively small molecular size, TTX possesses eight contiguous stereogenic centers in its polyfunctionalized dioxaadamantane skeleton including an orthoester and a guanidine moieties. This fascinating molecule has been a popular target for many synthetic chemists although only a few successful total syntheses have been reported to date. We initiated our synthetic studies on TTX in the hope of identifying the exact location of sodium channels where TTX blocks. Recent progress of our approach will be discussed in the lecture.