Strategy-first synthesis planning for complex natural products
SynthEx is presented as an LLM-agent system that can draft credible synthesis routes for complex natural products.
The paper says conventional retrosynthesis tools do well on catalogue-shaped benchmarks but struggle with natural products whose structures require more inventive planning. SynthEx generates competing route strategies, builds them into step sequences, then critiques and revises its own plans. In blinded assessments, expert chemists judged its key steps comparable to published human syntheses. The authors also release SynthAtlas, an open database of routes to more than a thousand natural products. ArXiv · AI/CL/LG's note
The paper says conventional retrosynthesis tools do well on catalogue-shaped benchmarks but struggle with natural products whose structures require more inventive planning. SynthEx generates competing route strategies, builds them into step sequences, then critiques and revises its own plans. In blinded assessments, expert chemists judged its key steps comparable to published human syntheses. The authors also release SynthAtlas, an open database of routes to more than a thousand natural products. ArXiv · AI/CL/LG's note
score 5