Principles, implementation, and application of biology-oriented synthesis (BIOS).

Biology-oriented synthesis (BIOS) represents an alternative approach for the generation of compound collections for biological applications. In BIOS, biologically relevant and prevalidated scaffold structures, such as core structures of natural products or known drugs, are employed as scaffolds for the generation of compound collections with focused diversity. In this review, we discuss the underlying concept of the BIOS approach, and its practical implementation in library design and synthesis. To highlight its relevance for chemical biology applications, we finally present examples in which compound collections generated under the BIOS principle have been used to elucidate biological questions.