Natural products (NPs) include crude drugs, extracts, botanicals and pure compounds obtained from nature. NPs offer a rich source of diverse biologically active compounds with high molecular diversity, varying structural complexity and unparalleled novelty. A significant portion of the currently prescribed drugs owe their origin either directly or indirectly to NPs. The bioactivity of NPs not only builds the foundation for ethnic medicine systems of the world but also provides an impetus to modern drug discovery. Isolation of active component/molecule, structure elucidation, biological evaluation, dereplication, semisynthesis, biosynthesis, as well as optimization of downstream processing have undergone revolutionary changes in recent times, thereby enhancing the rate of drug discovery. The advent of high throughput screening and the availability of combinatorial compound libraries in natural products have been attracting major innovators towards natural products. Translational research has brought the drug discovery team closer to the clinical setting and has simultaneously increased the collective involvement of clinicians and pharmaceutical scientists. Complexity of natural products is fitly matched by the complexity