Natural Products

Natural products are small molecules produced naturally by any organism including primary and secondary metabolites. These prodcuts include very small molecules, such as urea, and complex structures, such as Taxol. As they may only be isolable in small quantities, have interesting biological activity and chemical structures, natural product synthesis poses an interesting challenge in organic chemistry. Natural products (secondary metabolites) have been the most successful source of potential drug leads. However, their recent implementation in drug discovery and development efforts have somewhat demonstrated a decline in interest. Nevertheless, natural products continue to provide unique structural diversity in comparison to standard combinatorial chemistry, which presents opportunities for discovering mainly novel low molecular weight lead compounds. Since less than 10% of the world’s biodiversity has been evaluated for potential biological activity, many more useful natural lead compounds await discovery with the challenge being how to access this natural chemical diversity.