Diverse compounds from pleuromutilin lead to a thioredoxin inhibitor and inducer of ferroptosis.

The chemical diversification of natural products provides a robust and general method for the creation of stereochemically rich and structurally diverse small molecules. The resulting compounds have physicochemical traits different from those in most screening collections, and as such are an excellent source for biological discovery. Herein, we subject the diterpene natural product pleuromutilin to reaction sequences focused on creating ring system diversity in few synthetic steps.