Themed collection Botanical Natural Products in Drug Discovery

This Viewpoint describes events during the 1960s and 1970s that led to the discovery of taxol, which remains one of the most effective treatments for breast and ovarian cancer. We highlight lessons relevant to natural products drug discovery today.

This review covers the role of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as a whole organism model to study natural products for healthy aging. Literature between 2012 and 2023 was comprehensively analysed and is presented in a concise way.

Plants produce a wide array of secondary metabolites capable of inhibiting pathways crucial for microbial survival and pathogenicity.

This review highlights botanical natural products with activity against ovarian cancer and key drug development considerations for their advancement.

This review summarizes plant metabolites targeting crucial enzymes involved in glucose homeostasis useful for antidiabetic drug development.

The present review summarizes recent accomplishments made as part of a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional anticancer drug discovery project, wherein higher plant samples were collected primarily from tropical rainforests in Southeast Asia.

This article highlights previous and prospective uses for plant glycosyltransferases in generating and diversifying bioactive glycosides, with implications in drug discovery applications.

Many small molecule drugs are first discovered in nature, commonly the result of long ethnopharmacological use by people, and then characterized and purified from their biological sources.