Plants and fungi provide a rich source of highly diverse natural products and enzymes. This department focuses on the isolation, characterization, and modification of such compounds helping to understand their function in nature. Applications include the use of metabolites as lead structures for drugs or cosmetics, and the use of enzymes as screening targets or as catalysts for synthesis. This is backed by an extensive synthesis programme to increase compound availability and molecular diversity by combinatorial chemistry, method development, and de novo synthesis.