Vladimir Prelog

Summary of scientific research
Prelog's research covers particularly natural product chemistry and structural studies of alkaloids, steroids and a number of microbial metabolites. Among the latter the antibiotics, rifamycins, and siderophores, ferrioxamins play an important role in human medicine. He has made contributions to the concepts and practice of stereochemistry as exemplified in his studies of medium-sized ring compounds and their reactions, chirality of acyclic and cyclic compounds, conformation, asymmetric syntheses, analyses of the steric course of microbial and enzymatic oxido-reductase systems, and the proposal and improvements of the Cahn-Ingold-Prelog system for specification of the molecular chirality.