"Compounds isolated from nature have long been known to possess biological profiles and pharmaceutical potential far greater than anything made by man. However, they are notoriously cumbersome to isolate and challenging to synthesize, and the path of natural products to viable drugs is an arduous journey. This book presents a practical guide to gathering, isolating, and discovering new pharmaceuticals from nature. It emphasizes the challenges and advantages of products acquired from nature over traditional compounds such as those arising from combinatorial chemistry"--

"This impressive natural products book is intended as an introduction for undergraduates to natural products for the first time, and for students studying pharmacognosy and related fields who wish to broaden their understanding of the field. The book is not meant to be comprehensive, but rather an introductory text to natural products chemistry, and hence is broad rather than in-depth. It covers the major classes of natural product compounds and their sources. It is a preparatory text for more advanced studies on synthesis, biosynthesis, and mode of action studies. The authors have selected examples from marine life, plants, insects, and, importantly, actual examples taken from the pharmaceutical industry (e.g., anti-infective compounds), which are not always discussed or worked on in universities. Natural products have played a central role in advancing synthetic and biosynthetic chemistry, medicine, and our understanding of nature. The training of chemists and pharmacognocists in the area of microscale chromatographic purification and spectroscopy is ever increasing to tackle the challenging questions in bioorganic chemistry and molecular biology. Over the lifetime of this author, dramatic changes have taken place in our approaches for the isolation, structure determination, and mode of action studies of chemicals from nature: from isolation of large quantities to even nanogram quantities. It continues to be essential to properly train natural products chemists in the area of the analytical challenges in the field of botanical medicines (supplements), and to provide confidence to encounter ever-increasing new challenges to solve critical biological questions at the interface of bioorganic and molecular biology"--