Event Series

Molecular Discovery Seminar Series

Event Description

A central challenge in medicinal natural products is distilling complex mixtures down to bioactive compounds. To accomplish this goal, the gold standard approach is bioassay-guided fractionation, in which the mixture is subjected to successive rounds of purification and bioassays until an active compound is identified. Bioassay guided fractionation has historically played a critical role in drug discovery, but is, nonetheless, fraught with challenges. The process is biased towards the most abundant and easily isolatable mixture components, which may not be the most biologically active. Furthermore, if multiple compounds contribute either additively, antagonistically, or synergistically to the observed biological activity of the mixture, activity may be lost upon isolation. As a complementary strategy to bioassay-guided fractionation, our research group has developed untargeted metabolomics strategies to aid in the identification of bioactive mixture components. These strategies...