Natural Products Blog

The latest NPR issue includes Robert Hill’s Hot of the press on current development in bioorganic chemistry and novel natural products and six very exciting reviews.

From the defensive strategies of Cladobranchia, polyphosphate lipids, glucosidase inhibitors, plant medicinal alkaloids to 3D structures of membrane bound peptides and macroporous resins and their application in purification of natural products.

All of this condensed in a very exciting Issue 10.

Browse through it and let us now what you think.

Enjoy it!

We are pleased to introduce Viewpoints, a new article type for Natural Product Reports. Viewpoints will be short (up to 4 page) articles which focus on some of the key challenges in natural products research.

In the first Viewpoint article, by Samuel Danishefsky from Columbia University in the US, he talks about Diverted Total Synthesis (DTS) as the “awesome power” of chemical synthesis.

On the potential of natural products in the discovery of pharma leads: A case for reassessment
Samuel Danishefsky,  Nat. Prod. Rep., 2010, 27, 1114
DOI: 10.1039/c003211p

What do you think? Feel free to comment on it!

Viewpoints join NPR’s existing article types: Highlights, Reviews and Hot off the Press articles. Highlights are concise (4-8 page), non-comprehensive reviews which give a ‘snapshot’ of a hot or specialist research area. Reviews are more comprehensive articles and are generally between 10 and 25 pages in length. They can be overviews of a topic or an in-depth critique of a more specialist area of work. Completing the NPR stable of articles is Hot off the Press, the bi-monthly digest of the latest natural products research.

For further information about Viewpoints or any other NPR article types please contact the Editorial Office.

Natural Product Reports records a 23% rise to its highest ever figure of 9.202, according to 2009 data released by Thomson ISI on 17th June 2010.

It is the number 1 journal in both the organic and medicinal chemistry categories and it continues stimulating progress in all areas of natural products research.
Thank you to all the authors, referees, readers and the members of our editorial board for your continued support which has led to this fantastic result.

Read the latest articles

The scope of the journal is very broad and many reviews discuss the role of natural products in the wider bioinorganic, bioorganic and chemical biology communities. Areas covered include enzymology, nucleic acids, genetics, chemical ecology, carbohydrates, primary and secondary metabolism and analytical techniques.

Natural Product Reports also offers

• An excellent and professional service
• International editorial board, authorship and readership
• Indexed in MEDLINE and other major databases
• Free use of colour when it enhances the scientific understanding 

This is why Natural Product Reports is the leading journal in its field!

It is with great pleasure that we announce Professor Christopher Walsh, from Harvard Medical School, in the US, as the winner of the NPR Lecture Award for 2010.

Professor Walsh was selected in recognition of his work on natural product biosynthesis, in particular his work on investigating the structure and function of enzymes.

‘I am honoured to be selected for the 2010 NPR Lecture Prize’, says Professor Walsh. ‘I have come to natural products research from a background in chemical enzymology, focusing on the protein catalysts that carry out novel chemical transformations in the assembly of natural product scaffolds. I have found NPR to be the central resource to facilitate my education in natural products.  NPR is the first place that my group and I turn to for the scholarly breadth and depth on major natural product classes and for the highlights that put the current literature into context’

Professor Walsh will deliver his lecture, entitled ‘A post-translational approach to natural product biosynthesis’, during the ‘Symposium on Biosynthesis of Natural Products’ at Pacifichem 2010, in Honolulu, from 15th-20th December.

You can read some of his latest NPR articles:

Structural insights into nonribosomal peptide enzymatic assembly lines
Alexander Koglin, Christopher T. Walsh, Nat. Prod. Rep., 2009, (8),987-1000
DOI: 10.1039/b904543k

Total biosynthesis: in vitro reconstitution of polyketide and nonribosomal peptide pathways
Elizabeth S. Sattely, Michael A. Fischbach, Christopher T. Walsh, Nat. Prod. Rep., 2008, (4),757-793
DOI: 10.1039/b801747f

Biological formation of pyrroles: Nature’s logic and enzymatic machinery
Christopher T. Walsh, Sylvie Garneau-Tsodikova, Annaleise R. Howard-Jones, Nat. Prod. Rep., 2006, (4),517-531
DOI: 10.1039/b605245m

NPR sponsors a lecture each year at an international meeting. The recipient will have made a significant research contribution to natural products chemistry in its broadest sense, and will have published in or have had some affiliation to the journal. The award is open to anyone fitting these criteria.

From Natural Product Reports’ Editorial Office we would like to congratulate Christopher for this more than well deserved recognition.