Recent developments in the total synthesis of fungicidal natural products--a crop protection perspective.

Natural products play an important role as lead structures for the identification of novel active ingredients in crop protection. As it is the case in the pharmaceutical industry, however, many crop protection companies have substantially decreased their in-house efforts in natural product exploration. Therefore, joint projects with academic research groups become more and more important in the field.

Catalytic synthesis of (E)-alpha,beta-unsaturated esters from aldehydes and 1,1-diethoxyethylene.

A practical and high yielding synthesis of alpha,beta-unsaturated esters from aldehydes and 1,1-diethoxyethylene was developed.