Efficient control of the infectious diseases in the era of the emerging bacterial resistance demands consistent development of new antibiotic agents with novel modes of action. With some notable exceptions, the majority of the currently used antibiotics are natural product-derived compounds which were elaborated upon lead structures discovered by screening of various isolates. In this review, we summarized some selected examples of recent advances in the area of natural product based antibiotic development with particular emphasis on the synthetic and SAR-elucidation aspects.