Natural Products Screening

By Richard Parker - Conus magus 56mmUploaded by JoJan, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9831177

We are increasingly seeing a convergence between natural products/traditional medicine and basic science/biomedical, which is both discovering new natural product therapeutics, as well as identifying the molecular mechanisms of action of known metabolites.  A number of natural products affect well-known signaling pathways that contribute to disease, elucidating function and paving the way for further discoveries.  Abstract:

Natural products represent an inexhaustible source of novel therapeutic agents. Their complex and constrained three-dimensional structures endow these molecules with exceptional biological properties, thereby giving them a major role in drug discovery programs. However, the search for new bioactive metabolites is hampered by the chemical complexity of the biological matrices in which they are found. The purification of single constituents from such matrices requires such a significant amount of work that should ideally be performed only on molecules of high potential value (i.e. chemical novelty and biological activity). Recent bioinformatics approaches based on state-of the art mass spectrometry metabolite profiling methods are beginning to address the complex task of chemical identification of individual metabolites within complex mixtures. However, in parallel to these developments, methods providing information on the bioactivity potential of natural products prior to their isolation are still lacking and are of key interest to target the isolation of valuable natural products only. In the present investigation, we propose an integrated analysis strategy for bioactive natural products prioritization. Our approach uses massive molecular networks embedding various informational layers (bioactivity and taxonomical data) to highlight potentially bioactive scaffolds within the chemical diversity of crude extracts collections. We exemplify this workflow by targeting the isolation of predicted active and non-active metabolites from two botanical sources (Bocquillonia nervosa and Neoguillauminia cleopatra) against two biological targets (Wnt signaling pathway and chikungunya virus replication). Eventually, the detection and isolation processes of a daphnane diterpene orthoester and four 12-deoxyphorbols inhibiting the Wnt signaling pathway and exhibiting potent antiviral activities against CHIKV virus are detailed. Combined with efficient metabolite annotation tools, this bioactive natural products prioritization pipeline proves to be efficient. Implementation of this approach in drug discovery programs based on natural extract screening should speed up and rationalize the isolation of bioactive natural products.