Fluorinated analogues of bioactive compounds are finding increasing use as chemical probes for biomedical research, as radiographic tools, and as therapeutic agents of increasing lipid permeability and metabolic stability.'Although@-amino acids occur fairly widely in nature,* only a few of them have been synthesized so far. a-Fluoro-@-alanine (a metabolite of the antitumor drug 5-fluorouracil) has been prepared in several steps from ...
