Recent Advances In Natural Products

Natural products have been used by human society for millennia. New drug discovery being a complex and interdisciplinary enterprise has remained in continuous focus due to its great successes as well as failures. Despite what appears to be a slow death of natural products discovery research, many new and interesting molecules with biological activity have been published in the past few years. If natural products materials continue to be tested for desirable therapeutics activities, I believe that significant progress in identifying new antibiotics, oncology therapeutics and other useful medicines will be made. Recent study shows that the most of the leads from natural products have been from either plant or microbial sources collected from different habitats, especially marine environments could provide many novel chemicals. However, natural products research needs to turn over a new side; continued collection, extraction and screening of natural samples is not enough in this changing world. Science is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary and natural products research is shifting that way as well. In keeping with the above objectives, every effort has been made to edit this book receiving articles based on natural products from plants (Section-A) and microbial origin (Section-B), covering isolation, structure elucidations, biosynthesis, biological evaluation, bioprospecting of natural products. Attempt has been made to bring together recent progress and current trends in the field of natural products from different parts of the world. Although, there are a number of books available on natural products, this book has unique contributions in the form of chapters from experts in the field of chemistry, biology and bioinformatics against problematic infectious diseases and cancer. The primary intention to edit this book is to attract the post graduate students and stimulate their interest on natural products. So, the topics in this book have been carefully selected. Diverse methods for antimicrobial, antioxidants, antiviral, anticancer, antimutagenic, anti-inflammatory activities, has been elaborately discussed. The book also covers the source of natural products from different diversity such as mangrove and terrestrial plants, mushrooms, microalgae and marine microorganisms. Moreover, the book highlights telomerase inhibition and apoptosis induction, probiotics and functional foods in health benefits and metabolic pathway designing and epitope mapping of bacteria responsible for whooping cough which are different aspects in the field of natural products. Studies on essential oils from plants, plant-based remedies for management of diarrhea, microbial diversity and bioprospecting fungal endophytes and novel secondary metabolites from microalgae are also interesting chapters leading to natural products discovery. This book is proposed to cover recent trends in natural products and future perspectives especially in human health in dissimilar aspects. It is intended that this book will be useful to students, teachers and researchers in universities, R & D institutions and pharmaceutical industries.