Theoretical methods in configuration determinations for natural chiral products:research advances

Identification of natural products has been a big challenge because of their structural complexity and diversity.Recently,with the development of separation materials,more and more complex compounds have been found with small quantity,which causes difficulty in absolute configuration assignment. Now,the computational methods,such as to compute the 13 C NMR data and compare them with experimental results,could be used for relative configuration study;other methods,for example,to compute optical rotation(OR),or optical rotatory dispersion(ORD),electronic circular dichroism(ECD or CD) or vibrational circular dichroism(VCD),could be efficiently used for absolute configuration determinations for chiral compounds,including the derminant computations for chiral acyclic compounds. Now,two or two more methods are applied for the absolute configuration study and exhibit very powerful reliability.