The synthesis, biological evaluation and structure-activity relationship of 2-phenylaminomethylene-cyclohexane-1,3-diones as specific anti-tuberculosis agents.

The present study utilised whole cell based phenotypic screening of thousands of diverse small molecules against H37Rv () and identified the cyclohexane-1,3-dione-based structures and as hits. The selected hit molecules were used for further synthesis and a library of 37 compounds under four families was synthesized for lead generation. Evaluation of the library against lead to the identification of three lead antituberculosis agents (, and ).