Historical variation of structural novelty in a natural product library.

To evaluate the potential of natural products as novel structure suppliers, a historical analysis was performed on the structural novelty of a natural product library, viz., the Chapman & Hall/CRC Dictionary of Natural Products. The results show that although the unexplored natural product universe is still ample, it is more and more difficult to find novel agents from nature, with the discovery probability of novel structures and scaffolds being lower than 50% in the near future, which mainly results from the intrinsic redundancy of natural products and, thus, is unlikely to be reversed merely through technical progresses.