Synthetic organic chemistry aims toward the development of methods for the practical synthesis of important molecules such as bioactive ingredients, pesticides, dyes, and polymers. Although extraction of organic molecules from natural resources is possible, organic synthesis often provides a cheaper and more practical access to them from readily accessible starting materials, as well as the possibility to artificially modify the structure of naturally-occurring molecules to increase their activity or modulate their properties.
In medicinal chemistry, a standard approach to find the most potent active ingredient is the so-called combinatorial sythesis strategy: after identification of a promising structure, often a small molecule found in nature, a library of compounds with different substitution patterns is prepared and tested to find the bist hit.
