Natural product libraries from marine sources

Several of the most useful small-molecule probes are complex natural products isolated from marine, fungal, or plant sources. As natural products have built-in biologic properties efforts in the synthesis of compound libraries increasingly use natural product scaffolds as a starting material because they promise higher hit rates in biologic screens (23). 

Academic institutions are assembling both synthetic libraries and natural product repositories. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) operates a well-received resource providing natural product extracts, mostly from marine sources (http //www.dtp.nci.nih.gov/branches/npb/repository.html). 

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