Themed collection Celebrating the 40th anniversary of Natural Product Reports

Tobias Gulder, Editorial Board Chair, and Katie Lim, Executive Editor, reflect on the 40th anniversary of the launch of Natural Product Reports.

This viewpoint article promotes the ongoing efforts to organise natural product science within knowledge graphs, a promising approach for structuring training data for AI models capable of achieving human-level natural product anticipation.

The secondary metabolites of springtails (Collembola) include defensive compounds, cuticular lipids, and semiochemicals, many of which are not known from other natural sources. The springtail chemistry differs largely from that of insects.

We summarize recent research in the discovery and biosynthesis of bacterial organoarsenic natural products, providing unique chemical architecture and enzymologies.

A highlight on the discovery of the antifungal enfumafungin, its biosynthesis, activity profile and mode of action that led to the development program of ibrexafungerp, the first oral antifungal agent approved in more than 20 years.

Posttranslational modifications characterized over the past decade to engage the –(NH–C_α–CO)_n– repeating units in transformations are highlighted, particularly those leading to structural rearrangements by peptide backbone remodeling.

Here we compare chemical and biological total syntheses to the same metabolites.

Sorbicillinoids are a growing class of fungal natural products combining complex molecular architectures with pharmaceutically relevant bioactivities. This review covers their structural diversity, biosynthesis, and synthetic studies.

We describe the pipeline of anticancer agents from marine cyanobacteria, highlighting critical steps from discovery towards development, including the identification of the molecular target and mechanism of action, and solving the supply problem.

Large-scale sequencing has revealed the widespread occurrence of type I polyketides in all kingdoms of life, while co-culturing methods coupled with biochemical analysis have started to tease out their diverse ecological and physiological roles.

The shikimate pathway is the metabolic process responsible for the biosynthesis of proteinogenic, aromatic amino acids as well as a bevy of specialized metabolites in bacteria, fungi, and plants.

In natural products, a low optical purity is not generally associated with a sloppy enzymatic activity, but rather with the co-expression of antipodal enzymes/directing proteins or, alternatively, with erosion by enzymatic or spontaneous reactions.

Residual tumor burden and chemotherapy-resistance point to a need for drug leads active toward cancer stem cells. Just as natural products have led the way for current treatments, the potential for novel applications of these molecules remains high.

The evolution of the biosynthesis of coenzymes is proposed by analyzing the individual biosynthetic pathways in terms of their demand for (other) coenzymes.