Organic chemistry in South Africa

Abstract

It is an absolute honour to be able to preface a special issue on "Organic Chemistry in South Africa" in the 2020 volume of Arkivoc. Many South African organic chemistry practitioners have enthusiastically responded to my invitation to provide manuscripts for this issue, and it is my hope that the papers submitted will reflect the breadth and width of organic chemistry expertise across the country. Reflecting on the "vital signs" of organic chemistry within South Africa, it quickly becomes apparent that there are many complex factors affecting the health of the discipline. I thus decided to undertake my analysis by way of a brief SWOT-type protocol, i.e., strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats pertaining to the subject, whilst keeping in mind the potential pitfalls and limitations of this approach. In South Africa, the descriptor "organic chemistry" covers a very broad field, encompassing synthetic methods development to natural product isolation and some arguably more applied fields such as medicinal chemistry, polymer chemistry, catalysis, organometallic and inorganic chemistry (the latter three specifically with respect to ligand design and synthesis). This aspect places the South African organic chemistry community in quite a unique space on the African continent since, apart from a few more northern African countries, the phrase "Organic Chemistry" essentially implies research focussed on natural products chemistry (i.e. isolation and structure elucidation).One of the reasons for the strength of organic chemistry at the geographical tip of Africa is the infrastructure found at many universities there, encompassing equipment and expertise required for organic chemistry to thrive. This includes NMR, mass spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography facilities. It should be noted that these facilities are not equally distributed, with mainly the larger historically-advantaged universities being well equipped. In the last two decades, national equipment programs (through governmental funding agencies) have achieved greater equitability by the creation of regional equipment

Biological and Medicinal Chemistry in Africa

“…These same trends are evident in Africa, where the scope of science falling under the umbrella of chemical biology has expanded from traditional strengths in natural product chemistry, [8,9] organic chemistry, [10,11] and biochemistry, [12] into contemporary programs in enzymology, [13] biocatalysis, [14] bioinorganic chemistry, [15] medicinal chemistry and drug discovery. [16,17] Given the high burden of neglected disease in Africa, [18] the proclivity of chemical biology projects to occur in the multidisciplinary healthcare space [19] make it a particularly important field in Africa.…”

“…These same trends are evident in Africa, where the scope of science falling under the umbrella of chemical biology has expanded from traditional strengths in natural product chemistry, [8,9] organic chemistry, [10,11] and biochemistry, [12] into contemporary programs in enzymology, [13] biocatalysis, [14] bioinorganic chemistry, [15] medicinal chemistry and drug discovery [16,17] …”

Arkivoc, the platinum open access journal for organic chemistry, as it approaches its 25th anniversary

“…12 The regional and thematic issues also need to be highlighted. There have been six regional issues, comprising: Mexico (2003), Ukraine (2005), Argentina (2011), South Africa (two issues in 2020) 13 and Australia (2022). 14 The three thematic issues to date have all been on the same topic, namely hypervalent iodine chemistry (2020, 2021 and 2022), [15][16] but thematic issues on other subjects are planned.…”