Natural products from plants, marine life, animals, fungi, bacteria, and other organisms remain the most productive source of inspiration for small-molecule drug discovery. Today, a wealth of information on natural products that is particularly valuable to applications in cheminformatics is at our disposal. In this contribution, we provide a timely overview of relevant resources for measured chemical, biological, and structural data on natural products. In particular, we comment on the accessibility, scope, chemical space, and limitations of the individual data sources. The bottleneck of natural products remains the limited availability of material for testing. In this context, we analyze the number of natural products readily obtainable from commercial and other sources.
Keywords: Chemical space; Cheminformatics; Components of traditional medicines; Databases; Drug discovery; Natural products; Readily obtainable natural products; Vendors; Virtual screening.