Abstract
Plant-derived natural products have long been considered a valuable source of lead compounds for drug development. Natural extracts are usually composed of hundreds to thousands of metabolites, whereby the bioactivity of natural extracts can be represented by synergism between several metabolites. However, isolating every single compound from a natural extract is not always possible due to the complex chemistry and presence of most secondary metabolites at very low levels. Metabolomics has emerged in recent years as an indispensable tool for the analysis of thousands of metabolites from crude natural extracts, leading to a paradigm shift in natural products drug research. Analytical methods such as mass spectrometry (MS) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) are used to comprehensively annotate the constituents of plant natural products for screening, drug discovery as well as for quality control purposes such as those required for phytomedicine. In this review, the current advancements in plant sample preparation, sample measurements, and data analysis are presented alongside a few case studies of the successful applications of these processes in plant natural product drug discovery.
Highlights
Nature provides a rich source of numerous bioactive compounds that have been extensively employed in traditional medicine since time immemorial [1]
Current metabolomics strategies are mainly reliant on four major approaches: gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC-MS), capillary electrophoresis–mass spectrometry (CE-MS), and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy
Considering that the focus of this review is on the discovery of plant natural products, we mainly describe the processing of untargeted metabolomics experiments, defined as the unbiased processing of all signals within a dataset
Summary
Nature provides a rich source of numerous bioactive compounds that have been extensively employed in traditional medicine since time immemorial [1]. The basic goal of metabolomics is to provide a comprehensive qualitative and/or quantitative analysis of all metabolites present in a living system [17] This concept could be extended in natural product drug discovery via studying the relationship between the whole metabolome of natural-derived remedies and their biological effects [18]. Bioinformatics tools based on molecular networking such as GNPS [28] and MetGem [29] have been implemented to assign known metabolites from their complex mixtures, and to elucidate the chemical structures of novel compounds of interest This 2019, review the recent developments of metabolomics in the context of plant natural product drug discovery including current advances in sample preparation techniques and analytical profilingplatforms. Outlook for the increasing use of metabolomics in these fields is provided
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