Marine Natural Product Artefacts: Valuing an Unnatural Window into New Chemical Space

Dear Colleagues,

Virtually all natural products researchers at one time or another in their career serve as either an author or reviewer (and on rarer occasions, editor) of natural product manuscripts, as an advisor and/or examiner of natural products research students, or as an applicant and/or assessor of natural product grant applications. In all these endeavours, individual attitudes, perceptions and even prejudices play an important role, albeit informed by specialist disciplinary knowledge and expertise. For example, after several decades as an active natural products scientist, I continue to be amazed at the range of highly polarized attitudes that exist towards natural product artifacts. In this context, artifacts are substantive structure transformation products, from natural products, induced during extraction, fractionation, analysis, handling and/or storage. The spectrum of positions held on artifacts range from artifact celebrants, who actively seek to detect, derive value from, and report on encounters with artifacts; to artifact ignorers, who are seemingly oblivious to the existence of artifacts, which they routinely misrepresent as natural products; to artifact deniers, who accept the existence of artifacts, which they dismiss as mere "processing mistakes", ill-deserving of inclusion in the scientific literature. As an unapologetic artifact celebrant, in this short introductory review I seek to stimulate discussion on the potential benefits that accrue from studying artifacts, and in doing so attract original submissions and associated commentary on informative encounters with artifacts in marine natural products science.

Although the alternate spelling, "artifact" and "artefact", appear in the natural products literature, the term "artifact" is currently far more common. In the interests of consistency, we request that all manuscript submissions to this Topical Collection use the "artifact" spelling.

Prof. Robert Capon
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• Marine natural products
• Artifact
• Chemical reactivity
• Chemical ecology
• Chemical communication
• Prodrugs