Lead finding strategies in pharmaceutical research comprise structure-based drug design as well as screening effortsof natural product pools or large chemical libraries. In this context we propose a combined approach by utilizingnatural product-derived structure information on receptor- or enzyme-complementarity for designing unique corestructures that can be employed as privileged template molecules underlying combinatorial libraries. A set of rulesfor the transformation of molecular frameworks from natural products to structurally defined peptidomimetics isintroduced. Special emphasis is laid on the correspondence in the orientational properties and functionalizationpatterns between natural products and regular protein secondary structures.