The synthesis of complex molecules will be facilitated by the further development of a computer program named SYNGEN which will be supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program. This will aid the chemist in the design of new efficient routes to the increasingly complex molecules required by the advances in medicine, biology and agriculture. The first version of a computer program (SYNGEN) embodies logic for synthesis design, yielding only shortest, construction-only sequences from real starting materials, without resorting to yield prediction or a database library. This initial version is successful within its narrow constraints and establishes the validity of the approach. The program will be refined and amplified into a fully practical tool for organic chemists to use to generate viable synthesis pathways. To this end, the program will be exported for trial use to assess its shortcomings. It is also intended to incorporate some refunctional- izations both by a forward-synthesis program and by a more abstract functionality description in the retrosynthetic direction, to allow new dissection modes for tight polycyclics, to prune output via incompatible functionality recognition, to amplify hetero-atom and heterocyclic chemistry, to connect a reference library of reactions, and to explore stereochemistry, fragmentations and rearrangements. Beyond the main synthesis program, tools will be developed for the areas of substructure search, reaction cataloguing, and isomer genera- tion.
