Synthesis, Biological Activity and Photophysical Studies of Ellipticine and its Derivatives: State of the Art

Bioactivities and Action Mechanisms of Ellipticine Derivatives Reported Prior to 2023

Currently, natural products are one of the priceless options for finding novel chemical pharmaceutical entities. Ellipticine is a naturally occurring alkaloid isolated from the leaves of Ochrosia elliptica Labill. Ellipticine and its derivatives are characterized by multiple biological activities. The purpose of this review was to provide a critical and systematic assessment of ellipticine and its derivatives as bioactive molecules over the last 60 years. Publications focused mainly on the total synthesis of alkaloids of this type without any evaluation of bioactivity have been excluded. We have reviewed papers dealing with the synthesis, bioactivity evaluation and mechanism of action of ellipticine and its derivatives. It was found that ellipticine and its derivatives showed cytotoxicity, antimicrobial ability, and anti-inflammatory activity, among which cytotoxicity toward cancer cell lines was the most investigated aspect. The inhibition of DNA topoisomerase II was the most relevant mechanism for cytotoxicity. The PI3K/AKT pathway, p53 pathway, and MAPK pathway were also closely related to the antiproliferative ability of these compounds. In addition, the structure-activity relationship was deduced, and future prospects were outlined. We are confident that these findings will lay a scientific foundation for ellipticine-based drug development, especially for anticancer agents.

Synthetic, biological and optoelectronic properties of phenoxazine and its derivatives: a state of the art review

Phenoxazines have sparked a lot of interest owing to their numerous applications in material science, organic light-emitting diodes, photoredox catalyst, dye-sensitized solar cells and chemotherapy. Among other things, they have antioxidant, antidiabetic, antimalarial, anti-alzheimer, antiviral, anti-inflammatory and antibiotic properties. Actinomycin D, which contains a phenoxazine moiety, functions both as an antibiotic and anticancer agent. Several research groups have worked on various structural modifications over the years in order to develop new phenoxazines with improved properties. Both phenothiazines and phenoxazines have gained prominence in medicine as pharmacological lead structures from their traditional uses as dyes and pigments. Organoelectronics and material sciences have recently found these compounds and their derivatives to be quite useful. Due to this, organic synthesis has been used in an unprecedented amount of exploratory alteration of the parent structures in an effort to create novel derivatives with enhanced biological and material capabilities. As a result, it is critical to conduct more frequent reviews of the work done in this area. Various stages of the synthetic transformation of phenoxazine scaffolds have been depicted in this article. This article aims to provide a state of the art review for the better understanding of the phenoxazine derivatives highlighting the progress and prospects of the same in medicinal and material applications.

The Journey of 1-Keto-1,2,3,4-Tetrahydrocarbazole Based Fluorophores: From Inception to Implementation

Carbazole is a unique template associated with several biological activities. It is due to the diverse and versatile biological properties of carbazole derivatives that they are of immense interest to the research community. 1-keto-1,2,3,4-tetrahydrocarbazoles are important synthetic intermediates to obtain carbazole derivatives. Several members of this family emit fluorescence on photoexcitation. In the context of biochemical and biophysical research, designing and characterising small molecule environment sensitive fluorophores is extremely significant. This article aims to be a state of the art review with synthetic and photophysical details of a variety of fluorophores based on 1-keto-1,2,3,4-tetrahydrocarbazole skeleton.