Linington Roger G
Department of Chemistry, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6, Canada.
ACS Cent Sci. 2025 Aug 12;11(9):1536-1545. doi: 10.1021/acscentsci.5c00804. eCollection 2025 Sep 24.
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.
天然产物在生物医学、农业和生态科学中继续发挥着重要作用。然而，尽管包括基因组学、转录组学、表型组学和代谢组学在内的“组学”技术不断进步，但对于自然界化学多样性的范围和规模仍未达成明确共识。天然产物化学数据库的发展和成熟为从一系列不同角度探索这一问题提供了机会。本展望将利用天然产物图谱中的数据，研究分子生物合成类别之间的相似性和变异性，探索结构如何与功能相关联，并考察天然产物科学当前时代新骨架发现的范围和规模。它对已知的化学多样性进行了审视，探究这种多样性能告诉我们关于潜在转化应用的哪些信息，并探讨当前知识如何为我们在未来研究中可能发现的内容提供参考。
