Natural product

A chemical compound produced by a living organism. Natural products are studied for their biological activities and uses in medicine, agriculture, and research.

Secondary metabolite: A compound made by an organism that is not directly required for its basic growth or reproduction. Many natural products are secondary metabolites with ecological roles such as defense or signaling.
Drug discovery: The process of identifying and developing substances that can prevent, diagnose, or treat disease. Natural products provide biologically active starting points for finding medicines.
Biosynthetic gene cluster: A group of neighboring genes that collectively encode a specialized metabolic pathway. Such clusters often contain the enzymes needed to build and tailor a natural product.
Synthetic compound: A chemical compound produced through deliberate chemical synthesis rather than harvested from an organism. It contrasts compounds made by laboratory synthesis with those produced biologically.
Aspirin: A pain-relieving and anti-inflammatory drug whose development drew on salicylate chemistry from plants. Its history connects plant-derived compounds with the rise of modern pharmaceutical chemistry.
Primary metabolism: The biochemical processes that produce compounds and energy essential for an organism's growth and survival. It distinguishes compounds central to basic physiology from specialized natural products.
Penicillin: A group of beta-lactam antibiotics originally isolated from Penicillium molds. Penicillin shows how a microbial natural product became a foundational medicine.
Nonribosomal peptide synthetase: A large enzyme assembly that makes peptides without using ribosomal protein synthesis. These enzymes produce structurally varied natural products, including antibiotics.
Semisynthesis: The chemical modification of a compound obtained from a natural source. Many medicines retain a natural-product scaffold but are improved through semisynthetic changes.
Fleming's discovery of penicillin: The 1928 observation that a Penicillium mold inhibited bacterial growth in a culture plate. This landmark observation began the development of penicillin as an antibiotic.

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