Abstract
Despite the abundance of fluorine in the Earth’s crust naturally occurring organofluorine compounds are comparatively rare in nature with those isolated to date totalling no more than about a dozen confined to a few plants and two species of bacteria. Notwithstanding considerable interest and a variety of speculative suggestions, the mechanism of biological C-F bond formation is still unknown, although significant progress has been made in elucidating the pathway by which biosynthesis of fluoroacetate and 4-fluorothreonine occurs in the bacterium Streptomyces cattleya. In this chapter we review the nature and distribution of organofluorine compounds formed biologically and discuss the progress made in our understanding of C-F bond biosynthesis over the 60 years since fluoroacetate was first identified as a natural product.
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© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Harper, D.B., O’Hagan, D., Murphy, C.D. (2003). Fluorinated Natural Products: Occurrence and Biosynthesis. In: Gribble, G. (eds) Natural Production of Organohalogen Compounds. The Handbook of Environmental Chemistry, vol 3 / 3P. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/b10454
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/b10454
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