Current Drug Targets - Volume 12, Issue 11, 2011

Secondary metabolism plays a major role in the evolution of organisms as they represent a source of highly diversified molecular scaffolds able to interact with multiple protein targets [1, 2]. Such interactions may both serve as molecular clues to deter competitors, or alternatively facilitate symbiosis [3, 4]. Thus, natural products are building blocks to generate and respond to evolutionary pressure. In the past millenia, huma Read More

Biological diversity and its constituent chemical diversity have served as one of the richest sources of bioprospecting leading to the discovery of some of the most important bioactive molecules for mankind. Despite this excellent record, in the recent past, however, bioprospecting of biological resources has met with little success; there has been a perceptible decline in the discovery of novel bioactive compounds. Sev Read More

Small bioactive molecules are pre-requisite for any discovery discipline. Being aware of the fact that bioactivity is not randomly dispersed in the vast chemical space, chemists have been developing hypothesis that can provide access to these islands of bioactivities. Natural products have always been a source of inspiration and their structural motifs provide biologically relevant starting points for library synthesis. In additio Read More

After decades of neglect in industrial research the comeback of natural products is due since improved screening approaches are at disposal, yielding a multitude of new compounds from natural sources. Besides traditional compound libraries peptides are characterized by an enormous structural complexity, thus increasing the chance of finding a hit in a screening. Emphasizing antibacterial compounds structural comple Read More

Sesquiterpene lactones are a large group of secondary plant metabolites mostly known from the Asteraceae family. They exert a broad variety of different biological activities. This review attempts to critically summarise the knowledge on the anti-inflammatory and cytotoxic activity of SLs, with a special focus on parthenolide and helenalin. Recent advances on their molecular modes of action, allergic potential and also QSAR stu Read More

Many proteins are transported from the nucleus to the cytoplasm by the exportin CRM1, which recognizes cargo proteins through a leucine rich nuclear export signal (NES). This nuclear export process can be inhibited by several small molecules, both natural products and fully synthetic compounds. The structural basis for the inhibition of nuclear export by leptomycin (LMB) based on disruption of the protein/protein inter Read More

Natural products continue to be a source of inspiration for chemists and biologists alike. The search for biologically active natural products has provided troves of information about biological processes, and natural products continue to be some of the most powerful and useful probes of biological processes available. Complex and unusual molecular architectures provide the impetus for new reaction development and pu Read More

Inflammation, although first characterized by Cornelius Celsus, a physician in first Century Rome, it was Rudolf Virchow, a German physician in nineteenth century who suggested a link between inflammation and cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, pulmonary diseases, neurological diseases and other chronic diseases. Extensive research within last three decades has confirmed these observations and identified the Read More

Cyanobacteria are considered a promising source for new pharmaceutical lead compounds and a large number of chemically diverse and bioactive metabolites have been obtained from cyanobacteria over the last few decades. This review highlights the structural diversity of natural products from freshwater and terrestrial cyanobacteria. The review is divided into three areas: cytotoxic metabolites, protease inhibitors, and ant Read More

Nature provides science and society with a virtually unlimited supply of structurally diverse and biologically active molecules; the natural products. While some are directly useful in commercial applications, others are valuable for studying and understanding biological phenomena at the molecular level. An example is the signaling of nerve cells, which has been explored in considerable detail using a number of bioactive n Read More

This review provides a detailed account on the biological activities of structurally diverse secondary metabolites from marine sponges having 2-aminoimidazole, glycociamidine and/or 2-thiohydantoin ring functions. This review will complement two previous short reviews which did however not address the potential of these natural products for drug discovery. We will discuss the naturally occurring alkaloids and give an acco Read More