ABSTRACT
Natural products discovery programmes expanded tremendously during the last two decades of the 20th century because of a series of technological advances. The ability to develop molecular bioassay targets, the introduction of mechanisms to robotically control much of the screening process, and the incorporation of information systems to analyse results have given rise to the capacity for screening very large numbers of samples in short periods of time. This coupled with concern that available biological resources will be diminished (e.g. Wilson, 1988) helped fuel tremendous interest in natural products screening in the 1980s and 1990s. Plants were the major focus of screening and numerous efforts to collect large sets of plant samples were established during this period for several reasons. Plants have always been an important source of chemical compounds useful in medicine and agriculture, they are quite diverse with more than 250,000 species (Thorne, 2002), they are easier to collect than many other groups of organisms, and they are easily cultivated to produce raw material for production.
