Herboxidiene: Determination of absolute configuration by degradation and synthetic studies

Degradation of the novel polyketide herbicide herboxidiene leads to useful fragments for further analogue synthesis and also enabled determination of the absolute configuration of the natural product via asymmetric synthesis of the respective fragments. A combination of degradation, and asymmetric synthetic studies enabled the absolute configuration of herboxidiene to be determined. The fragments obtained from degradation are useful for the preparation of semi-synthetic herboxidiene analogues