“…Notable among these are azadirachtin (Broughton, Ley, Slawin, Williams & Morgan, 1986;Ley, Santafianos, Blaney & Simmonds, 1987) and miharamycin A and B (Seto et al, 1983); azadirachtin is an insect anti-feedant (Rembold, 1984;Koul, 1984a,b) and miharamycin A and B are active against the rice blast disease caused by Pyricularia oryzae (Seto et al, 1983). As a result of increasing interest in using simple sugars as chiral synthons, we are pursuing the search for convenient and efficient approaches to the synthesis of furopyran and related fused-ring systems from readily available sugars and their derivatives.…”