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Natural compounds are evolutionary selected and prevalidated by Nature, displaying a unique chemical diversity and a corresponding diversity of biological activities. These features make them highly interesting for studies of chemical biology, and in the pharmaceutical industry for development of new leads. Of utmost importance, for the discovery of new biologically active compounds, is the identification and charting of the corresponding biologically relevant chemical space. The primary key to this is the coverage of the natural products' chemical space. Here we introduce ChemGPS-NP, a new tool tuned for handling the chemical diversity encountered in natural products research, in contrast to previous tools focused on the much more restricted drug-like chemical space. The aim is to provide a framework for making compound classification and comparison more efficient and stringent, to identify volumes of chemical space related to particular biological activities, and to track changes in chemical properties due to, for example, evolutionary traits and modifications in biosynthesis. Physical-chemical properties not directly discernible from structural data can be discovered, making selection more efficient and increasing the probability of hit generation when screening natural compounds and analogues.
Larsson et al. (Wed,) studied this question.