Minor phytocannabinoids analogues: synthesis and antimicrobial activity

The emergence of antimicrobial resistance has stimulated the search for new molecular scaffolds with improved antibacterial properties. Among natural products, phytocannabinoids have attracted increasing interest as privileged structures for medicinal chemistry. While research has mainly focused on the major cannabinoids (CBD and THC), minor cannabinoids remain largely unexplored despite their significant potential.¹

In this work, we describe the design and synthesis of a series of structural analogues of the non-psychotropic minor cannabinoids cannabigerol (CBG) and cannabichromene (CBC). The synthetic strategy enables systematic structural modifications of the cannabinoid framework, providing access to chemically diverse derivatives for structure–activity relationship studies. The resulting compounds were evaluated against Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacterial strains to investigate the influence of key structural features on antimicrobial activity. This approach aims to identify molecular determinants associated with antibacterial potency while expanding the chemical space of cannabinoid-inspired scaffolds for the development of new antimicrobial agents.