February 26, 2025
FOCUS on Bioactive Natural Products. In a February Nature Communications paper, Wang and coworkers showed that a sesquiterpenoid found abundantly in ginger, known as furanodienone, alleviated […]
November 19, 2024
Is coffee good for your brain? N-Eicosanoyl-serotonin (EHT), a novel natural product found in coffee, has been shown to have a protective effect in models of […]
November 19, 2024
Focus on Drug Discovery. A biopharmaceutical company called Soligenix is developing the natural product hypericin as a treatment for cutaneous T-cell lymphoma. Hypericin, applied as a […]
July 18, 2024
Focus on Natural Products: Celebrating the birthday of Satoshi Omura (July 12). Omura is well known for his work on the isolation and structure identification of […]
July 12, 2024
Natural Product Cellular Probes. Ascochlorin is a novel isoprenoid isolated from Acremonium egyptiacum. It is a specific inhibitor of the mitochondrial cytochrome bc1 complex (mitochondrial respiratory […]
July 9, 2024
Natural Product-Inspired Drugs. Camptothecin, an alkaloid isolated from Camptotheca acuminata, is a potent inhibitor of DNA topoisomerase I. Numerous useful analogs of camptothecin have been synthesized: […]
July 9, 2024
Focus on Natural Products: Microcystin LR, a cyanobacterial toxin that inhibits protein phosphatase 2A, was recently shown to stimulate tumor-associated macrophages to adopt an anti-tumor M1 […]
June 27, 2024
On World Microbiome Day (June 27, 2024) we focus on gut microbial metabolites. Phenylacetyl-L-glutamine (PAGln) was shown to be a cardiovascular disease-linked gut microbial metabolite acting […]
June 27, 2024
Focus on Bioactive Natural Products: Verrucarin A, a structurally intriguing natural product produced by soil microbe Myrothecium spp. was shown by Kondo et al. to attenuate […]