Welcome
There is an increasing interest of pharmaceutical industry in the natural environment
as a source for new lead compounds. This interest is based on the fact that
the chemical diversity of natural bioactive compounds is much higher than that
of compounds synthesized by standard combinatorial chemistry. The challenge
which arises, if working with bioactive compounds from natural sources, is the
elucidation of the target towards which a given compound acts. In addition,
natural compounds display an impressively high selectivity due to evolutionary
shaping (evolutionary combinatorial chemistry). Therefore, it can be expected
that the discovery of novel bioactive natural products based on a success-oriented
bioprospecting will significantly contribute to innovation in the field of life
science. The exploitation is of major impact on the advancement of basic science
and also, economically oriented, on the advancement of bio-medicine.