Themed collection Celebrating the 40th anniversary 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.

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

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.