Functional Molecules from Natural Sources

This book is based upon the

proceedings of a conference,

Functional Molecules from

Natural Sources, organised by

the Royal Society of

Chemistry’s Biotechnology

Group and held at Magdalen

College, Oxford, in July 2009.

Most of the eighteen chapters

are in the form of a transcript of

an individual lecture given at

the conference, while others

are derived from a selection of the posters presented at it, and the final

chapter provides a summary of those lectures for which a transcript was

not available. In order to gain most benefit from the book, readers require

some prior knowledge of medicinal or pharmaceutical chemistry and,

consequently, its usefulness to many chemistry undergraduate students

is likely to be limited. Moreover, at £109.99, it is priced well beyond that

which most undergraduates would be willing to spend. As is to be

expected from any book where individual chapters are written by different

authors, the style of the writing varies considerably from chapter to

chapter. In some of the best chapters the original ‘transcript’ appears to

have been re-written by its author to make it a more readable chapter in

the book. The book concentrates on the continuing importance of active

compounds originally identified in and isolated from microbial, plant, and

marine sources. The first chapter consists of a comprehensive survey of

anticancer compounds that are currently undergoing clinical trials. This is

followed by chapters that are case studies of the identification of

functional compounds, their subsequent development and enhancement.

While later chapters deal with the biosynthesis and genetics of active

compounds. Altogether there is much to interest those working in drug

discovery and development, or related fields. For undergraduate

students, and their teachers, probably the two most useful chapters are

“Discovery and Development of Antibiotics with Novel Modes of Action”

(S B Singh), an interesting and elegantly written account of the discovery

of platensimycin for development as a new antibiotic, and “High Capacity

Countercurrent Chromatography for Fast Isolation of Natural Products”

(I J Gerrard and D Fisher), a concise account of an important technique

that is unlikely to be encountered in standard undergraduate chemistry

textbooks.

The book contains few errors, and these are simply printing mistakes.

However, in some of the cases where the skeletal formula of a

compound is included in the text it is on a different page to that in which

the compound is first introduced, thus necessitating superfluous page

turning and sometimes making it more difficult to compare molecular

structures, while in others the size in which the formula has been printed

is so small (e.g. page 63, figure 11) as to make comparison of structures

hard work. Other figures too, including some photographs of cultures

from a microbial strain collection (page 85, figure 2) have been printed

too small to serve any useful purpose. The use of colour in the three

dimensional molecular diagrams, especially where this had clearly been

intended (e.g. page 179, figure 22), would also have been helpful.

Although such flaws are not uncommon in contemporary chemistry texts,

it would have made the reading of this book a more comfortable

experience if they had been rectified prior to publication. It is possible that

increasing the number of pages to accommodate larger figures or enable

their position in the text to be changed, and the use of colour for

diagrams, were rejected on grounds of cost. But if that is the case, a

more appropriate economy would have been to publish the book as a

paperback rather than a hardback.

* Higher Phys Ed Sci Acad Cen - Journal 22 Vol 12 Issue