Modern-day medicines have their origin from plants. Traditional use of various plant products by the local people paved the way for the discovery of wide ranging allopathic medicines.

Efforts have been to cover comprehensively wide ranging topics on the chemistry of natural products in this book. The book has twenty chapters. Eighteen chapters are devoted to the chemistry and basics of primary and secondary metabolites obtained from natural sources. The initial five deal with importance of plant products, methods of their characterization and the way these products are biosynthesized by plants. One chapter is devoted to the importance of products of marine origin. Chapters six to seventeen deal with all the categories of natural products like carbohydrates, amino acids and proteins, nucleic acids, terpenoids, carotenoids, steroids, lipids and eicosanoids, phenolics, glycosides, alkaloids and vitamins. Latest developments like nutraceuticals, genes and genetic manipulations have been discussed at appropriate places in these chapters. The chapter on antibiotics throws light on the importance of metabolites obtained from microbes. One chapter is fully devoted to the details of some important medicinal plants of Indian origin.

The last two chapters on polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons and heterocyclic compounds, though not exactly the part of curriculum of chemistry of natural products, but are essential to understand the chemistry of natural products. Considering the importance of chemistry of such compounds, these two chapters have been included in this book.

Special care has been taken to elaborate IUPAC nomenclature of certain chemical classes like steroids, eicosanoids, polycyclic aromatic compounds and heterocyclic compounds.

Undergraduate and postgraduate students of science and pharmacy would find the book very handy and useful in the study of their course on chemistry of heterocyclic chemistry.

Salient Features

Importance of the study of chemistry of natural products has been underlined by giving examples of natural products used as lead molecules for drug discovery and development.
Biogenetic pathways are described schematically for majority of the secondary metabolites to give a bird's eye view to the readers of the biogenetic processes taking place in the plants.