ABSTRACT
Natural products comprise a voluminous source of new and strikingly diverse bioactive compounds for pharmaceutical and agrochemical development. In medicine they have already been heavily used for many years and form a very substantial part of prescribed drugs — antibiotics being one very good example. However, this is not the case in plant protection. Very few natural products or their derivatives are currently used as agrochemicals; pyrethroids are probably the only example of true success. There are three major reasons for this drastic dearth of natural products in the plant protection area: complex structure, insufficient stability, and, sometimes, high toxicity.
