Natural dictionary

The definition of a drug differs between dictionaries and among the various professional specialisms. A search of the internet elicited various definitions and a paraphrase of the most memorable is a compound can be defined as a drug if, when injected into a rodent, it yields a scientific publication . Although this is a memorable definition, for the purposes of this review, however, a drug is defined broadly as a compound that has properties that influence the health of an animal when ingested or administered to that animal. A brief look at current literature will quickly convince the reader that this is a definition which covers man-made and natural compounds that can be extracted from plant material and microbes and iised. ... 

There are a large number of naturally occurring molecules which have not yet been obtained by chemical synthesis. A convenient source of information on such compounds is The Dictionary of Organic Compounds, Fifth Addition (1982) and Supplements 1-5, published as a multivolume series by Chapman and Hall, New York and London J. Buckingham, Executive Editor. This compendium contains references to syntheses which are not included in this collection, especially those involving simpler target structures. 

It is desirable for the record to have an objective statement of the nature and degree of color deterioration. The simplest, but least desirable, method is comparison of sample color with color charts or plates such as those used in the Munsell system, Ridgeway s color standards, or the Maerz and Paul dictionary of color. Such a method is limited in value because of the difficulty of obtaining true color matches, and because of variations due to human error. The use of color charts or plates may be much improved in the Munsell system by employing a disk colorimeter (29). Kramer and Smith (21) have pointed out that the results obtained in its application to foods are sometimes difficult to explain and compare, and that the method requires special training of the operator and is tedious and cumbersome. 

Fortunately for a poor, would-be chemist like Leblanc, France s aristocratic passion for the physical sciences crossed economic, social, and political borders. Intellectuals such as Rousseau and Diderot cultivated the sciences with enthusiasm and compiled encyclopedias and dictionaries of natural substances. Local academies and institutes in the far-flung provinces sponsored chemical studies. Crowds flocked to hear chemists lecture and to watch their flashy laboratory demonstrations. Even the future revolutionary, Jean-Paul Marat, experimented with fire, electricity, and light and tried—in vain—to become a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences. In America, Benjamin Franklin abandoned his printing and publishing business for physics, and in England his friend Jane Marcet wrote Mrs Marcet s Conversations in Chemistry for women and working-class men. 

Eigen, M. The Physicist s Conception of Nature, quoted in A Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations , compiled by Green, J., Pan Books 1982... 

J. Buckingham (Ed.), Dictionary of Natural Products, Vols. 1-4, Chapman Hall, 1994. 

The DNP (Chapman HaU/CRC Dictionary of Natural Products) is a comprehensive literature database of around 170 000 isolated natural products from various sources and provides names, chemical structures, CAS registry numbers, extensive source data, uses and applications. 

The Dictionary of Natural Products database is available from Chapman HaU/CRC Press at http //www.chemnetbase.com... 

For this task, easily accessible properties of mixtures or pure metabolites are compared with literature data. This may be the biological activity spectrum against a variety of test organisms. Widely used also is the comparison of UV [90] or MS data and HPLC retention times with appropriate reference data collections, a method which needs only minimal amounts and affords reliable results. Finally, there are databases where substructures, NMR or UV data and a variety of other molecular descriptors can be searched using computers [91]. The most comprehensive data collection of natural compounds is the Dictionary of Natural Products (DNP) [92], which compiles metabolites from all natural sources, also from plants. More appropriate for dereplication of microbial products, however, is our own data collection (AntiBase [93]) that allows rapid identification using combined structural features and spectroscopic data, tools that are not available in the DNP. 

Bukingham J, Thompson S (1997) Dictionary of natural products and other information somces for natmal products scientists. In Phytochemical diversity - a somce of new industrial products. Royal Society of Chemistry, London, pp 53-67 (2001) Dictionary of Natmal Products on CD-ROM, Chapman and HaU/CRC Press Laatsch H (1994 and annual updates) AntiBase, A database for rapid structmal determination of microbial natmal products. Chemical Concepts, Weinheim, Germany Breheret S, Talou T, Rapior S, Bessiere JM (1997) J Agric Food Chem 45 831 Schulz S (2001) private commimication, Braunschweig, Germany Burkholder PR, Pfister RM, Leitz FH (1966) Appl Microbiol 14 649 Reid RT, Live DH, Faulkner DJ, Butler A (1993) Nature 366 455... 

The main remit of this chapter is to provide reference and plant source details of new flavone and flavonol 0-glycosides discovered since 1991, i.e., covering the years 1992 to 2003. A checklist of all (as far as possible) known structures is also included in Appendices A and B. A series of reviews, which include most of the data on new 0-glycosylflavones and flavonols presented here, have appeared in Natural Product Reports and cover the years 1992 to 1994, 1995 to 1997, and 1998 to 2000, and with a fourth (2001 to 2003) " in press. Other useful sources of data are The Phytochemical Dictionary,The Handbook of Natural Flavo-noids, and for general background reading Jeffrey Harborne s Comparative Biochemistry of the Flavonoids. 

According to the Dictionary of Natural Products (DNP), there are 25 different classes of monoterpenes [37]. 

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