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Natural products

Mapping an amazing thicket

Nature Chemical Biology volume 13, pages 6–7 (2017)Cite this article

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The Global Natural Products Social Molecular Networking (GNPS) resource and the DEREPLICATOR algorithm provide new tools for analyzing mass spectral data and enabling natural products discovery.

Wöhler, in writing to Berzelius in 1835, said of natural products that they were “a primeval tropical jungle, full of the most remarkable things, an amazing thicket, without escape or end, into which one would not dare to enter.” Since then, scientists have made excursions into the thicket, leading to the discovery of diverse classes of natural products and the characterization of their biological activities. Because they can bind with high selectivity and specificity to various biological targets and often cross membranes, natural products are indispensable for cell–cell interactions in both multicellular and single-celled organisms. Their stability also enables them to accumulate and modulate biology across ecosystems. It is thus no surprise that they have been harnessed as pharmaceuticals and as tools for understanding biological systems. Discovery of new natural products, however, has diminished over the past 30 years. Our classical, one-at-a-time, activity-guided approaches to natural product discovery continue to find the same known compounds. However, new approaches to natural products discovery, including one reported recently in Nature Biotechnology1 and one in this issue of Nature Chemical Biology2, offer the potential to bring large-scale order to this thicket.

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Figure 1: GNPS enables large MS/MS data sets to be shared and analyzed by users worldwide.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mark E. Horsman and Christopher N. Boddy are in the Department of Chemistry and Biomolecular Sciences and the Centre for Chemical and Synthetic Biology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.,

    Mark E Horsman & Christopher N Boddy

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  1. Mark E Horsman
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  2. Christopher N Boddy
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Correspondence to Christopher N Boddy.

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Horsman, M., Boddy, C. Mapping an amazing thicket. Nat Chem Biol 13, 6–7 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.2265

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