This review discusses successful strategies and potential pitfalls to assembling a natural product-based library suitable for high-throughput screening. Specific extraction methods for plants, microorganisms, and marine invertebrates are detailed, along with methods for generating a fractionated sub-library. The best methods to store, maintain and prepare the library for screening are addressed...

The endothelium is fundamental for the regulation of vascular tone and structure. Under disease conditions, including the presence of cardiovascular disease risk factors, the endothelium loses its protective role and becomes a proatherosclerotic structure. In this article we searched for strategies from PUBMED and Science Direct databases using the following key words: endothelium, natural bioa...

Bioactive marine natural products can be defined as biologically active products, both secondary metabolites as well as enzymes, lipids and heteropolysaccharides derived from marine sources. Marine natural products have been found to be an important source of drugs and drug leads. These natural products are secondary metabolites and enhance survival fitness and may serve as chemical weapons use...

1Laboratory of Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Democritus University of Thrace, 68100 Alexandroupolis, Greece 2Institute of Technology of Agricultural Products, Hellenic Agricultural Organization-DEMETER, 15310 Athens, Greece 3Department of Food and Nutritional Sciences, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6AD, UK 4School of Biomedical Scienc...

This study was designed to discuss some of the important issues related to the current status of herbal drugs in the development of newer therapeutics agents. The approach to new drugs through natural products has proved to be the single most successful strategy for the discovery of new drugs. In this review we consider the past, present, and future value of employing information from plants us...

Plant endophytic microorganisms represent a largely untapped resource for new bioactive natural products. Eight polyketide natural products were isolated from a mangrove endophytic fungus Phomosis sp. A818. The structural elucidation of these compounds revealed that they share a distinct feature in their chemical structures, an oxygen-bridged cyclooctadiene core skeleton. The study on their str...

Bioactive natural products play critical roles in modern drug development, especially anticancer agents. It has been widely reported that various pharmacological activities of such compounds are related to their antioxidant properties. Vanillin is a natural substance widely found in many plant species and often used in beverages, foods, cosmetics, and pharmaceutical products. Antioxidant and an...

The purpose of diversity-oriented synthesis is to drive the discovery of small molecules with previously unknown biological functions. Natural products necessarily populate biologically relevant chemical space, since they bind both their biosynthetic enzymes and their target macromolecules. Natural product families are, therefore, libraries of pre-validated, functionally diverse structures in w...

Diosgenin (Figure 1) is a bioactive steroidal sapogenin belonging to the triterpene group and is of great interest to the pharmaceutical industry [1]. It is the aglycone formed by the hydrolysis of saponin dioscin (Figure 1), a compound found in Dioscorea spp. [2]. It serves as an important starting material for the production of corticosteroids, sexual hormones, oral contraceptives as well as ...

Natural or synthetic? Several petrosaspongiolide M natural and synthetic analogues have been tested as proteasome inhibitors and apoptosis modulators. The natural petrosaspongiolide M congeners gave a consistent decrease in activity. Among the synthetic analogues, the introduction of the benzothiophene ring resulted in a bioequivalent alternative of the petrosaspongiolide M terpenoid system.