Screening of Natural Products
Pharmacognosy provides the tools to identify, select and process natural products destined for medicinal use. Usually, the natural product compound has some form of biological activity and that compound is known as the active principle - such a structure can act as a lead compound (not to be confused with compounds containing the element lead). Many of today's medicines are obtained directly from a natural source.
On the other hand, some medicines are developed from a lead compound originally obtained from a natural source. This means the lead compound:
- can be produced by total synthesis, or
- can be a starting point (precursor) for a semisynthetic compound, or
- can act as a template for a structurally different total synthetic compound.
This is because most biologically active natural product compounds are secondary metabolites with very complex structures. This has an advantage in that they are extremely novel compounds but this complexity also makes many lead compounds' synthesis difficult and the compound usually has to be extracted from its natural source - a slow, expensive and inefficient process. As a result, there is usually an advantage in designing simpler analogues.
Read more about this topic: Natural Product
Famous quotes containing the words natural and/or products:
“Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.”
—Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)
“All that is told of the sea has a fabulous sound to an inhabitant of the land, and all its products have a certain fabulous quality, as if they belonged to another planet, from seaweed to a sailor’s yarn, or a fish story. In this element the animal and vegetable kingdoms meet and are strangely mingled.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)