Written by the team that brought you the prestigious Dictionary of Natural Products (DNP), the Natural Products Desk Reference provides a concise overview of the key structural types of natural products and their interrelationship. A structurally diverse group, ranging from simple aliphatic carbon chains to high molecular weight proteins, natural products can usually be classified into one or more groups. The text describes these major types, including flavonoids, carbohydrates, terpenoids, polyketides, and lipids, and it illustrates them with accurate chemical structures, demonstrating the biosynthetic relationships between groups.

• Provides details of specialist natural products journals and journals in biochemistry, biology, medicinal chemistry, organic chemistry, pharmacy, pharmacology, and toxicology that may contain important information on natural products
• Includes types of names that can be used for natural products, comprising functional parent names, trivial names, systematic names, semisystematic names, and semitrivial names
• Covers stereochemistry topics specific to natural products
• Presents an overview of the natural world and its classification, focusing on organisms that are the richest sources of natural products
• Details known types of natural product skeletons with their numbering, or where there are skeletal variations within the group, an illustration is given of a representative example compound
• Discusses carbohydrate nomenclature impacts on stereochemistry, and on the nomenclature of compounds other than mainstream carbohydrates
• Reviews general precautions for handling chemicals in a laboratory environment, highlighting hazards resulting from the acute toxicological and pharmacological properties of some classes of natural products and hazards associated with the use of organic solvents

In addition to being a companion resource to the DNP, the Natural Products Desk Reference provides you with a mass of other useful information which can sometimes be hard to track down. In compiling it, the authors have drawn on over 20 years of day-to-day experience in the description and classification of all types of natural product.

John Buckingham is a former lecturer in organic chemistry at the University of London, London, United Kingdom. He has been involved with the Chapman & Hall/CRC chemical database since its inception in 1980, initially as a Chapman & Hall employee and more recently as editorial consultant. From the database, various editions of the Dictionary of Organic Compounds and the Dictionary of Natural Products (both of which have been for some years solely electronic) have been produced. In addition, he compiled (with W. Klyne and later with R. A. Hill) two editions and supplements of the Atlas of Stereochemistry and has coauthored several other specialist dictionaries in the Chapman & Hall/CRC series.
He is also the author of the popular science books Chasing the Molecule and Bitter Nemesis: The Intimate History of Strychnine.

Caroline M. Cooper completed her BSc in chemistry at King's College London in 1968, and then worked at Glaxo Research in Greenford. She contributes to the Dictionary of Organic Compounds, and, in 2011, she edited the second edition of Organic Chemist's Desk Reference, both published by CRC Press.

Rupert Purchase studied chemistry at the South-East Essex Technical College [Grad. RIC Part II (External), 1967] and the University of York (DPhil, 1972). He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a visiting fellow at the University of Sussex (2014-2017). Dr. Purchase contributes to The Combined Chemical Dictionary published by CRC Press, and is a freelance editor for Science of Synthesis: Houben-Weyl Methods of Molecular Transformations published by Georg Thieme Verlag, Stuttgart. He edited the Royal Society of Chemistry's (RSC) Environmental Chemistry Group Bulletin from 1995 to 2013 and was awarded the RSC's Long Service Award in 2011.