Asima Chatterjee: A unique natural products chemist

Asima Chatterjee, along with T R Seshadri1, T R Govindachari2 and K Venkataraman, is one of the best known Indian natural products chemists of the last century. She has made significant contributions to the chemistry of alkaloids, coumarins and other plant products. By her relentless research efforts, she was able to isolate a large number of natural products from many species of plants indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, unravel their structure by degradative, spectroscopic and synthetic procedures. In the process, she developed new synthetic methods, discovered mechanisms of reactions and brought to light other aspects of natural products that she studied, such as chemotaxonomy and their medicinal applications.