We report a novel, facile and highly stereoselective approach to the indolo[2,3-a]quinolizine ring system from a readily available, non-racemic chiral template. We demonstrate the potential for application of this methodology to natural product synthesis through conversion of the template to a simple indole alkaloid with high enantiomeric purity.

Our approach to compiling this review, which covers a selection from the literature of the year 2002, has once again been to choose targets and papers that were of interest to the authors; our apologies to those researchers who have published many elegant approaches to the natural products that were omitted at this stage. We have continued with our method of cataloguing the information by highlighting certain key reaction steps within a chosen total synthesis, and have broken up the review into the following major reaction classes: aldol chemistry, coupling reactions, cyclisations, cycloadditions, enzymatic transformations, metathesis reactions, a selection of miscellaneous reaction types and rearrangement reactions.

We report a novel, facile and stereoselective approach to the indolizino[8,7-b]indole ring system from a readily available, non-racemic chiral template.

We report a novel, facile and stereoselective approach to a tricyclic tetrahydroisoquinoline ring system from readily available, non-racemic, bicyclic lactam substrates.