Parasitic weeds of the species Striga, Alectra and Orobanche are responsible for serious
reductions of crop yields in semi-tropical and tropical regions in the entire world. The can live on
various legumes and grasses. The can only survive when they are attached to an appropriate
host plant. The parasitic weeds produce seeds in vast amount which can lay dormant in the soil
for up to twenty years. The growth in initialized by hatching agents, the strigolactones, excreted
by the host plant. Due to this mechanism the parasitic weeds ensure that the appropriate host is
present to profit on. To tackle this problem, some solutions were introduced, like hand weeding,
crop rotation with catch or trap crops and the development of resistant food crops. However,
the most promising solution is probably the idea of suicidal germination. Spreading natural
strigolactones over an infested garden plot would break dormancy of the seeds. Since no
appropriate host is present, the hatched seeds will die of starvation.
There are several natural strigolactones, which all possess the same backbone. The
mechanism which initiates the seeds to hatch is also known. A drawback of the idea of suicidal
germination is the fact that the natural strigolactones are difficult to synthesize. Therefore it is
economically not feasible to synthesize these compounds on a large scale. This is why a lot of
research had been done to develop analogues which possess the same biological activity, but
are a lot cheaper to produce. The most known analogue is GR24, one that is also produced by
Chiralix. In order to know how useful a newly developed analogue ism its bioactivity can be
compared to the values of known natural strigolactones. The goal of this research project is to
develop synthetic routes for Chiralix to obtain racemic strigol and racemic sorgolactone, two
natural strigolactones. A wide screening of all known routes towards these compounds has been
combined in a literature thesis before the research started. Combining the features of the
routes eventually led to a synthetic plan. The execution of this plan can not be displayed over
here, because this information is confidential. The made compounds can be sold to research
facilities for reference bioactivities.