Recent applications and developments of organic azides in total synthesis of natural products.

Organic azides have been exploited since their discovery because of their high reactivities. Various organic reactions using azides have been synthetically applied in chemical biology, pharmaceuticals, medicinal, and agricultural areas. In this review, we present some recent applications and developments of organic azides in the total synthesis of natural products (mostly within five years), especially alkaloids. We focus not only on application examples of organic azides, but also show their preparation methods including recently reported procedures concerning their decomposing and reducing methods in the syntheses of bioactive molecules.