Thin‐layer chromatography (
TLC
) is a widespread separation technique in the field of plant analysis and offers multiple advantages. This versatile technique can provide useful information about the qualitative or semiquantitative chemical composition of a mixture, thanks to coupling, with the detection and spectroscopic techniques and devices for image treatment. Moreover, it can contribute to the detection of biological activity by combining chromatography with bioassays, such as antimicrobial or enzyme inhibition tests. This procedure, providing simultaneous chromatographic separation and
in situ
assessment of a given biological activity, is named
TLC
bioautography. The major advantage of this technique is the ability to locate active substances from a complex mixture without prior sample purification. This avoids time‐consuming and tedious isolation of already‐known or inactive compounds. As this method is simple and cost effective, it is suitable for preliminary rapid screening to detect potential activity, as well as being a useful monitoring tool to track the bioguided isolation of active components. In this chapter, we focus on up‐to‐date
TLC
bioautographic assays, detail their mechanisms and applications in the field of natural drug discovery, and discuss the recent advances of this method that might appear at first glance to be a trivial approach.