The field of natural products science is enjoying a robust period of new method development after a long period where discovery methods remained largely unchanged. Areas of innovation span a wide range of topics, from new analytical modalities to a huge number of new computational tools. This special issue, guest edited by Alessandra Eustaquio, Amy Fraley, Aaron Puri and Roger Linington brings together a set of reviews each focused on a different emerging technology with the goal of clearly and frankly assessing the success of each method for natural products discovery and highlighting gaps and opportunities that could be filled by further development in each area. Please enjoy the articles in the collection below.
| Challenges in the complexity-to-diversity strategy for natural product-like compound synthesis: two sides of the same coin María Luz Tibaldi Bollati & Manuela García* Nat. Prod. Rep., 2026, Advance Article |
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Brief overview of recently reported misassigned natural products and their in silico revisions enabled by DU8ML, a machine learning-augmented DFT computational NMR method Srinivas Beduru & Andrei G. Kutateladze* Nat. Prod. Rep., 2026, Advance Article |
| Advancing biosynthetic pathway discovery through short-read-directed long-read sequencing (Open Access) Marco Gabrielli, Agathe Bredel, Lucas Paoli* & Serina L. Robinson* Nat. Prod. Rep., 2026, Advance Article |
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Emerging technologies for the discovery of biosynthetic genes in plants (Open Access) Anne Jaczkowski, Arne Bültemeier, Benedikt Seligmann, Boas Pucker & Jakob Franke* Nat. Prod. Rep., 2026, Advance Article |
| Structural determination of natural products at speeds and scale of high-throughput screening (Open Access) Christopher C. Thornburg, Rohitesh Kumar, Dongdong Wang, Barry R. O’Keefe* & Tanja Grkovic* Nat. Prod. Rep., 2026, Advance Article |
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Bacterial cytological profiling for mode-of-action discovery of natural product-derived antibiotics: progress, challenges, and future directions (Open Access) Poochit Nonejuie*, Thanadon Samernate, Filosofia F. T. A. Prasasti, Vorrapon Chaikeeratisak & Joe Pogliano Nat. Prod. Rep., 2026, Advance Article |
| Chemical language models for natural product discovery (Open Access) Koh Sakano, Kairi Furui, Apakorn Kengkanna, Yuta Kikuchia & Masahito Ohue* Nat. Prod. Rep., 2026, Advance Article |
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Inverse stable isotopic labeling for natural product characterization and discovery (Open Access) Jose Miguel D. Robes & Aaron W. Puri* Nat. Prod. Rep., 2026, Advance Article |
