PubMed2026
Natural products (NPs) remain a cornerstone of modern drug discovery, offering stereochemical complexity and diverse bioactivities that precisely modulate therapeutic targets, refined through billions of years of evolution. However, their research has long been hindered by inefficient, empirical workflows, high resource consumption, structural complexity, and the "multicomponent, multi-target" nature of their mechanisms. The exponential growth of genomic, metabolomic, and spectral data has overwhelmed conventional analytical methods, exposing critical bottlenecks in handling high-dimensional, heterogeneous datasets that exceed human interpretive capacity. Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a transformative paradigm to address these challenges, integrating multi-omics and chemical data to shift NP research from fragmented empiricism toward mechanism-driven, precision-oriented development. By leveraging deep learning architectures- including graph neural networks, Transformers, and diffusion-based generative models-AI enables systematic decoding of NP biosynthesis, automated structure elucidation, rational target identification, knowledge extraction from vast unstructured scientific literature, and de novo molecular design. This review comprehensively surveys recent advances in AI applications across the full NP discovery and development pipeline, encompassing genome mining, structure-based and ligand-based virtual screening, multimodal structural characterization, lead optimization, and biosynthetic pathway engineering. We further examine the emerging roles of protein-centric, molecule- centric, and multimodal foundation models, as well as large language models, in bridging genotype-to-chemotype gaps and unlocking unstructured scientific knowledge. Finally, we discuss critical challenges including data scarcity, representational limitations for complex stereochemistry, physical plausibility in generative models, and the urgent need for experimental validation, while outlining future directions toward autonomous experimentation, closed-loop optimization, and human-AI collaborative discovery.