Project Details:
Recommendations on Nomenclature of Flavonoids
| Project No.: | 2009-018-2-800 |
| Start date: | 2010-03-01 |
| End date: | |
| Division: | Chemical Nomenclature and Structure Representation Division |
To disseminate throughout the scientific community guidelines for flavonoid nomenclature, including glycosides and C-glycosyl derivatives.
Flavonoids are a class of compounds with a wide variety of biological activities, which have attracted the attention of researchers in various domains ranging from chemistry to biology, biochemistry, pharmaceutical sciences and medicine. Consequently, they have been named in the literature by diverse criteria and appear with different names, quite a number of them ambiguous and incorrect. In addition, trivial names have been assigned and in several cases more than one trivial name is known for a single compound. The aim of this project is to correct the situation as a matter of urgency. This will involve a small team of experts who will establish a guide to the nomenclature of flavonoids, their systematic names, focusing on the use of primes and citation order of locants with and without prime(s) in aglycones, glycosides and C-glycosyl derivatives and their accepted trivial names. Flavonoid (flavans, isoflavans and neoflavans) classification into various subclasses based on the degree of oxidation will also be considered.
Flavonoid structures, found in nature or obtained by synthesis, become more and more complex, and a guide for aglycone systematic names is urgently needed also to allow the construction of the names of their polyglycosylated species with clarity and conciseness.