Figure 28.
Illustration of the Paal-Knorr target-guided synthesis strategy. The binding of an aniline (yellow) and 1,4-diketone (blue) within the active site of COX-2 enables an in situ Paal-Knorr reaction that delivers a pyrrole product whose structure can be tailored to be fluorescent by the use of aryl-substituted diketones and aromatic amines, as depicted in Figure 29.