Production of a Diverse Library of Plant Natural Products for Bioassays

Abstract

MolecularNature Ltd is currently producing a library of diverse purified plant natural products for lead discovery programs. The concept of a plant natural products library is not new, but the complexity of plant chemistry has made the purification and isolation process time consuming, and largely not cost effective. However, advancements in chromatographic and spectroscopic techniques now make it possible to obtain a chemical fmgerprint of plants, identify the chemicals which are unusual or not commercially available, and rapidly purify them for pharmaceutical, agrochemical and food additive assays. These same chemical fingerprinting techniques also enable us to carry out work in other areas such as herbal analyses, GM plant assessment, and detection of microbial toxins in both plants and animals.