title: Historical variation of structural novelty in a natural product library.
abstract: To evaluate the potential of natural products as novel structure suppliers, a historical analysis was performed on the structural novelty of a natural product library, viz., the Chapman & Hall/CRC Dictionary of Natural Products. The results show that although the unexplored natural product universe is still ample, it is more and more difficult to find novel agents from nature, with the discovery probability of novel structures and scaffolds being lower than 50% in the near future, which mainly results from the intrinsic redundancy of natural products and, thus, is unlikely to be reversed merely through technical progresses.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Agricultural Microbiology, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, P R. China.
authors.forename: De-Xin
authors.initials: DX
authors.lastname: Kong
authors.forename: Ming-Yue
authors.initials: MY
authors.lastname: Guo
authors.forename: Zhi-Hong
authors.initials: ZH
authors.lastname: Xiao
authors.forename: Ling-Ling
authors.initials: LL
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Hong-Yu
authors.initials: HY
authors.lastname: Zhang
mesh_terms: D001688:Biological Products / Q000737:chemistry*; D016208:Databases, Factual / Q000592:standards / Q000639:trends; D055808:Drug Discovery; D015394:Molecular Structure; D008970:Molecular Weight; D013237:Stereoisomerism
chemical_list: D001688:Biological Products