The Research

Nat´u`ral prod´uct

(Chem..) A chemical substance produced by a living organism; - a term used commonly in reference to chemical substances found in nature that have distinctive pharmacological effects. Such a substance is considered a natural product even if it can be prepared by total synthesis Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 

To Natural Product Chemists the term natural product typically is referring to secondary metabolites produced by living beings. These are typically organic molecules smaller than 2000 g/mol, and are produced by highly specialized and dedicated biosynthetic gene clusters comprised of unique secondary metabolite enzymes. Due to their organic nature and small size, we can effectively extract them from living organisms such as bacteria, fungi and plants using organic solvents of varying polarity.