Natural products discovery needs improved taxonomic and geographic information

Abstract

Covering: up to 2016Marine and terrestrial organisms yield a remarkable chemical diversity and are important sources for discovery of new chemical products. In order to maximize the bioprospecting efficiency of natural products (NP), taxonomy, geography and biodiversity are starting to be used to draw conclusions on which taxonomic groups and/or regions may be of interest for future research. However, accurate taxonomic information and sampling location of source organisms have often been overlooked. Although these issues were already reported a few decades ago and improvements have been made, such outstanding problems are still recurrent in recent peer-reviewed literature. Here, we focus on the importance of taxonomic and geographic identification of source material and illustrate how taxonomic and geographic data of source organisms continues to be poorly handled. It is our opinion that this issue needs to be discussed within the NP community with the ultimate goal of improving publication standards and guaranteeing the scientific principle of research reproducibility. Moreover, by doing so, it will be possible to take advantage of information available in the literature to develop cross-disciplinary meta-analyses that may help to advance the state of the art of NP research and future bioprospecting endeavours.