Expanding the Potential of Metabolomics for Under Investigated Organisms and in Drug Discovery

Dear Colleagues,

Natural products (NPs) constitute an important part of our everyday diet; their components and nutritional/medicinal values have also been intensively studied for decades. The existence of NPs at minor levels in such a complex matrix, or being even labile, is expected, and isolation of such compounds still poses a challenge. The comparison of metabolite composition of biological systems (known as metabolomics) is now a mature field that has been increasingly applied to expedite natural products drug discovery. Metabolomics underlying emerging spectroscopic and informatics technologies has indeed demonstrated potential towards shorter drug discovery leading to a paradigm shift in NPs research. Metabolomics is rapidly evolving, with many novel techniques becoming available, i.e., MS imaging, HR-MAS NMR. The convergence of metabolomics and NPs discovery has also been demonstrated much more often from natural terrestrial origin mostly in planta, with much less evidence from other resources. It is expected that algae, fungi, sponges, sea corals, gut microbiota, etc., have an enormous potential to act as providers for novel bioactive metabolites. The integration of metabolomics towards facilitating the discovery and chemistry of plant derived NPs, is expected to be revealed from other organisms. In light of these urging topics, Molecules is introducing a new Special Issue on “Metabolomics” and its applications. This Special Issue shall include two general themes: The first is to focus on diverse range of metabolomics applications, many of which to be related to investigations in under investigated organisms. The second shall provide reports on novel experimental technologies in metabolomics or developments needed for the analysis of labile NP classes.

Prof. Mohamed A. Farag
Dr. Andrea Porzel
Guest Editors

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