There has been a remarkable resurgence of interest in natural product based food items from the last few decades. With the outstanding/developments in the areas of separation science, spectroscopic techniques, and microplate-based ultrasensitive in vitro assays, natural product research is enjoying renewed attention for providing novel and interesting chemical scaffolds. The various available hyphenated techniques (GC-MS, LC-PDA, LC-MS, LC-FTIR, LC-NMR, LC-NMR-MS, CE-MS) have made possible the preisolation analyses of crude extracts or fractions from different natural sources, isolation and on-line detection of natural products, chemotaxonomic studies, chemical finger printing, quality control of herbal products and metabolomic studies. This talk will present, with practical examples, a general overview of the processes involved in natural product research, starting from extraction to determination of the structures of purified products and their biological activity.