Chemotaxonomy, also called chemosystematics, is the attempt to classify and identify organisms according to confirmable differences and similarities in their biochemical compositions. The chemical diversity and the resources of natural products are immense and nowhere near fully exploited. Chemotaxonomy-based strain selection is a prerequisite for successful natural product research. Combined with the fact that fungi, and probably also other types of microorganisms, produce very species-specific profiles of natural products that can be used as efficient tools to select one or a few representative strain(s) for biological testing, and with the revolution in molecular genomics several new strategies for natural products based drug discovery programs are being developed:
There are several other steps to deal with when running a natural product discovery program, which can be summarized:
(i) collection, selection, and cultivation of organisms;(ii) extraction and biological evaluation;(iii) dereplication;(iv) isolation and structure elucidation of metabolites;(v) biological evaluation;(vi) information management.
