An Assessment of Chemical Diversity in Microbial Natural Products

Natural products continue to play important roles in biomedical, agricultural and ecological science. Yet despite ongoing advances in “omics” technologies, including genomics, transcriptomics, phenomics and metabolomics, there is still no clear consensus on the scope and scale of chemical diversity in the natural world. The evolution and maturation of chemical databases for natural products offer opportunities to explore this question from a range of different perspectives. This Outlook will use data from the Natural Products Atlas to examine rates of similarity and variation among biosynthetic classes of molecules, to explore how structure can be related to function, and to examine the scope and scale of new scaffold discovery in the current era of natural products science. It presents an examination of known chemical diversity, investigates what this diversity can tell us about potential translational applications, and explores how current knowledge informs what we might expect to discover in future studies.

Open-source databases inform our understanding of the known landscape of natural products. These analyses can identify themes among known compound classes and highlight new avenues for investigation.