Chemical Diversity of Natural Resources and the Bioactivity of their Constituents

Authors

  • Jean-Luc Wolfender Phytochimie et Produits Naturels Bioactifs Ecole de Pharmacie Genève-Lausanne Section des Sciences Pharmaceutiques Université de Genève Quai Ansermet 30, CH-1211 Genève 4, Switzerland. jean-luc.wolfender@unige.ch
  • Emerson Ferreira Queiroz Phytochimie et Produits Naturels Bioactifs Ecole de Pharmacie Genève-Lausanne Section des Sciences Pharmaceutiques Université de Genève Quai Ansermet 30, CH-1211 Genève 4, Switzerland

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2533/chimia.2012.324

Keywords:

Bioactive natural products, Drug discovery, Metabolomics, Microflow nmr, Stress induction, Uhplc-tof-ms

Abstract

Natural products (NPs) have historically been an important source of lead molecules in drug discovery. However, the interest that the pharmaceutical industry has had in NPs has declined in part because of the lack of compatibility of traditional natural-product extract libraries with high-throughput screenings and the low hit rate. Furthermore, in contrast to the synthetic libraries, compounds from natural sources are likely to have complex structures which slow down the identification process and contribute to problems related to supply and manufacturing. In this paper, we summarise some of the strategies that are being developed in our research unit to address these issues. On one hand, differential screening strategies were established with the aim of identifying dynamically induced NPs from silent biosynthetic pathways in plants and fungi that had been exposed to different stress situations. On the other hand, high-resolution HPLC techniques were optimised for biological and chemical profiling of crude extracts. This led to an integrated platform for rapid and efficient identification of new drug-leads and biomarkers of interest that were based on miniaturised technological approaches and metabolomics.

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Published

2012-05-30

Issue

Section

Scientific Articles

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