Abstract

Alkaloids are interesting groups of natural products with important biological properties, but naturally available alkaloids are insufficient for biological studies. Therefore, the demand for higher amounts of alkaloids made research community to synthesize alkaloids by innovative techniques. The importance of asymmetric reactions for scientific community to obtain enantiomerically pure compounds with good yield and diastereomeric excess (de) or enantiomeric excess (ee) by different strategies of asymmetric induction is emphasized in this review. In addition, importance have been given to discuss on biologically important alkaloids, their skeleton synthesis, intermediates and total synthesis with different strategies mainly based on chiral auxiliaries, chiral reagents and chiral metal ligand based catalysts.