Even though natural products has an excellent record as a source for new drugs, the advent of ultrahigh-throughput screening and large-scale combinatorial synthetic methods, has caused a decline in the use of natural products research in the pharmaceutical industry. This is due to the efficiency in generating and screening a high number of synthetic combinatorial compounds; whereas traditional ...

Even though natural products has an excellent record as a source for new drugs, the advent of ultrahigh-throughput screening and large-scale combinatorial synthetic methods, has caused a decline in the use of natural products research in the pharmaceutical industry. This is due to the efficiency in generating and screening a high number of synthetic combinatorial compounds; whereas traditional ...

The diversity of species is striking, but can be far exceeded by the chemical diversity of compounds collected, produced or used by them. Here, we relate the specificity of plant-consumer interactions to chemical diversity applying a comparative network analysis to both levels. Chemical diversity was explored for interactions between tropical stingless bees and plant resins, which bees collect ...

This chapter discusses whether plant chemical communication is a mechanism by which plant genetic diversity can affect the natural enemies of herbivores. Plant genetic diversity influences natural enemies, and these insects use volatile chemical cues to locate suitable habitats. However, the importance of chemical communication for these interactions has not been considered. In this chapter, th...

DNA is not only a repository of genetic information for life, it is also a unique polymer with remarkable properties: it associates according to well-defined rules, it can be assembled into diverse nanostructures of defined geometry, it can be evolved to bind ligands and catalyse chemical reactions and it can serve as a supramolecular scaffold to arrange chemical groups in space. However, its c...