Natural products as a hunting ground for combinatorial chemistry.

Natural products have a long history of success as biologically active leads for therapeutic agents. The ability to prepare analogues and to discover structure-activity relationships is necessary to truly harness the potential of natural products. Recently, combinatorial chemistry has risen to this challenge, and even fairly complex natural products can be targeted for parallel synthesis. Academic and industrial efforts have employed natural products from the peptide, alkaloid, polyketide, and terpenoid and steroid classes in combinatorial chemistry approaches for the production of medicinally important compounds.