Guiding principles for natural product drug discovery.

Natural products (NPs) have historically been a fertile source of new drugs for the pharmaceutical industry. However, this once-popular approach has waned considerably over the past two decades as the high-throughput screening of megalibraries comprised mainly of molecules with non-natural (synthetic) motifs has unfolded. Contemporary high-throughput screening libraries contain molecules compliant with physicochemical profiles considered essential for downstream development.

A tropical marine microbial natural products geobibliography as an example of desktop exploration of current research using web visualisation tools.

Microbial marine biodiscovery is a recent scientific endeavour developing at a time when information and other technologies are also undergoing great technical strides. Global visualisation of datasets is now becoming available to the world through powerful and readily available software such as Worldwind, ArcGIS Explorer and Google Earth. Overlaying custom information upon these tools is within the hands of every scientist and more and more scientific organisations are making data available that can also be integrated into these global visualisation tools.