A Full Year of Marine Natural Products Literature Reviewed: 1,256 New Compounds, With Analysis of AI's Role

Researchers at Griffith University in Australia and the University of Auckland and the University of Waikato in New Zealand published an annual review of marine natural products (MNPs) in Natural Product Reports. Covering the literature published over one year, it cites 617 references and centres on 1,256 new compounds reported in 336 papers.

Organised by source, activity and country, from microbes to mangroves

The review covers compounds isolated from marine microbes and phytoplankton, green, brown and red algae, sponges, cnidarians, bryozoans, molluscs, tunicates, echinoderms, and the submerged parts of intertidal plants such as mangroves. For each compound it organises the bioactivity, the source organism and the country of collection, and it also includes biosynthetic studies, first syntheses, and synthetic studies that corrected structures or stereochemistry. This edition separately analyses the role artificial intelligence (AI) plays in marine natural products research.

The series is published in the same format every year and serves as a reference for comparing trends in the discovery of marine natural products. For drug discovery researchers, it works as a map showing at a glance which structures come from which groups of organisms. However, because it is a literature review, the activity of individual compounds reflects the experimental conditions of the original papers, and most are results from early exploratory stages.