Construction of a natural product library containing secondary metabolites produced by actinomycetes

To construct a natural product library for drug screening, we isolated secondary metabolites from a wide variety of actinomycetes cultured from marine sponges. The results suggested that marine sponges are a promising source of actinomycetes with the potential to produce new metabolites. Furthermore, we evaluated the chemical space occupied by our natural product library (CB library) by multidimensional principal component analysis and compared it with a commercially available compound library (ZINC library), which was randomly selected from the ZINC library (approximately 30 000 000 compounds). The CB library occupied a wider chemical space than the ZINC library. Bioactive compounds in the CB library possessed a wide chemical space that was not covered by ZINC library. These results indicate that the CB library mainly comprises secondary metabolites from actinomycetes, and it has great potential as a source of compounds for drug screening. The Journal of Antibiotics (2012) 65, 443-447; doi:10.1038/ja.2012.52; published online 27 June 2012