Bioactive natural products database: an aid for natural products identification

Abstract

The area of natural products research is the most rapidly growing field of organic chemistry. Owing to the worldwide intensive research and the great technical developments in the isolation and identification techniques today, near to one million products — isolated from the most diverse living things — are known (see Fig.l). The total number of natural compounds with clearly defined biological activity is near to 100,000, including more than ten thousand bio-active microbial products. The largest family of these microbial compounds is the group of anti-biotic and anti-tumor compounds numbered around eight thousand. The number of other bio-active natural products, isolated mainly from higher plants is also tremendous including almost 5000 anti-microbial and anti-tumor compounds.