Question

Research area are important for the prioritization of natural product “hit” extracts? 1. Biological 2. Biochemical 3. Chemical Metabolomics 4. Taxonomic

Answer 1

1 Biological-Alkaloids one of the superclass of secondary metabolites as a source to treat wide variety of illness.Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine are a testimony to humans dependency on nature.The physiochemical features of different alkaloids were cross referenced to pharmocologically significant and other metrics.Published literature shows the potential of natural products as sources of highly diverse compounds and illustrates how natural products comprise a high proportion of sucessfully marketed new drugs over the last 20 years.The recent application of High -throughput screening technologies to natural products screening has greatly increased the number of hits found in natural screening programs.

2.Biochemical-Some of the features which distincts natural products from synthetic molecules are the number of nitrogen and oxygen atoms,the number of chiral centres and the ratio of aromatic atoms to ring atoms per molecule.Most companies are now more interested in incorporating natural product-like features into synthetically -prepared small molecule libraries so that these synthetic compounds reside within the same chemical space defined by trade drugs and natural products.More sophisticated infrastructure and cheminformatics are needed upfront to assess the potential of extracts for compound production and aid in the elimination of redundant ubiquitous compounds.

3 Chemical Metabolomics-Integration of high-content biological screening and untargeted metabolomics by Compound Activity mapping directly reveal the identities and biological functions of individual bioactive compounds in complex natural product librariesThe research may help to improve the screening process as well as helps in the integration of high-throughput screening,providing additional strategy for the discovery of the new gen natural product inspired drug leads and chemical probes.

4.Taxonomic- Plants are a valuable resource that are important for human needs .Inorder to understand the cellular processes associated with plants ,as in depth analysis of genomic,proteomic and metabolic information is required.For an advancement of plant-based drug discovery computational methodologies are required.Taxonomy are powerful tools for dereplication and prioritization ,when the secondary metabolites have limited distribution.The collections from the family shows higher positive response to anti-HIV screen