Professor Henok Kinfe was recently identified as a rising star in the field of Organic Chemistry by the Editorial Board of the highly reputable journal Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry (OBC; Impact Factor 3.559), published by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

He was invited by the Editor-in Chief of OBC, Professor Andrei Yudin, to contribute a research article to a New Talent issue, highlighting excellent work being carried out by younger members of the research community. Accordingly, Prof Kinfe and his team submitted a manuscript to this special issue which was published in the June edition (Moshapo et al, “A convenient domino Ferrier rearrangement-intramolecular cyclization for the synthesis of novel benzopyran-fused pyranoquinolines”, Org. Biomol. Chem., 2016, 14, 5627-5638).

More interestingly, the article featured on the front cover of the journal, signifying the importance and novelty of the work carried out by the UJ researchers. Their study entailed the preparation of polycyclic carbohydrate-based molecules via the Ferrier and Povarov-like reactions. The unique features of this methodology are the ability of the reaction to provide in high yields and diastereoselectivity, polycyclic compounds of complex molecular architectures via a domino-type multi-component transformation with an intriguing reaction mechanism. Evaluation of these novel compounds for their biological activity and further derivatization are currently under way.