‘Small molecule heterocycles’ play important role in both drug discovery and material science research providing one of the richest source of diversity, besides serving as rigid scaffolds for further display of a range of functionalities. Compounds classified as heterocyclic probably constitute the largest and most varied family of organic compounds. After all, every carbocyclic compound, regardless of structure and functionality, may in principle be converted into a collection of heterocyclic analogs by replacing one or more of the ring carbon atoms with a different element. Even if we restrict our consideration to oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur (the most common heterocyclic elements), the permutations and combinations of such a replacement are numerous. Prof. Ila has been engaged in design and development of new efficient methodologies for a wide range of substituted and fused five and six membered heterocycles utilizing organosulfur synthons such as polarized ketene dithioacetals and the corresponding N, S- acetals derived from them, as versatile building blocks. She has recently developed and synthesized new class of organosulfur synthons and utilized them for designing new reactions for diverse class molecular entities. Some of our recent results on these new synthetic methods derived from easily accessible organosulfur building blocks involving organometallic methods, radical cyclizations, transition metal catalyzed intramolecular C-C, C-N, C-S and N-O bond formation, multicomponent reactions, dipolar cycloadditions of metalloisocyanides, domino reactions and simple condensation reactions will be presented in the lecture
