Medicinal Natural Products

Book excerpt: Medicinal Natural Products: A Biosynthetic Approach, Third Edition, provides a comprehensive and balanced introduction to natural products from a biosynthetic perspective, focussing on the metabolic sequences leading to various classes of natural products. The book builds upon fundamental chemical principles and guides the reader through a wealth of diverse natural metabolites with particular emphasis on those used in medicine. There have been rapid advances in biosynthetic understanding over the past decade through enzymology, gene isolation and genetic engineering. Medicinal Natural Products has been extended and fully updated in this new edition to reflect and explain these developments and other advances in the field. It retains the user-friendly style and highly acclaimed features of previous editions: a comprehensive treatment of plant, microbial, and animal natural products in one volume extensive use of chemical schemes with annotated mechanistic explanations cross-referencing to emphasize links and similarities boxed topics giving further details of medicinal materials, covering sources, production methods, use as drugs, semi-synthetic derivatives and synthetic analogues, and modes of action Medicinal Natural Products: A Biosynthetic Approach, Third Edition, is an invaluable textbook for students of pharmacy, pharmacognosy, medicinal chemistry, biochemistry and natural products chemistry.