scholarly journals Bridging the gap between natural product synthesis and drug discovery

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (11) ◽  
pp. 1436-1453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathanyal J. Truax ◽  
Daniel Romo

Various synthetic strategies have been developed to explore natural products as an enduring source of chemical information useful for probing biological relevant chemical space and impacting drug discovery.

Biomolecules ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 1566 ◽  
Author(s):  
José L. Medina-Franco ◽  
Fernanda I. Saldívar-González

Natural products have a significant role in drug discovery. Natural products have distinctive chemical structures that have contributed to identifying and developing drugs for different therapeutic areas. Moreover, natural products are significant sources of inspiration or starting points to develop new therapeutic agents. Natural products such as peptides and macrocycles, and other compounds with unique features represent attractive sources to address complex diseases. Computational approaches that use chemoinformatics and molecular modeling methods contribute to speed up natural product-based drug discovery. Several research groups have recently used computational methodologies to organize data, interpret results, generate and test hypotheses, filter large chemical databases before the experimental screening, and design experiments. This review discusses a broad range of chemoinformatics applications to support natural product-based drug discovery. We emphasize profiling natural product data sets in terms of diversity; complexity; acid/base; absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity (ADME/Tox) properties; and fragment analysis. Novel techniques for the visual representation of the chemical space are also discussed.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nengzhong Wang ◽  
Zugen Wu ◽  
Junjie Wang ◽  
Nisar Ullah ◽  
Yixin Lu

A comprehensive and updated summary of asymmetric organocatalytic annulation reactions is presented; in particular, the applications of these annulation strategies to natural products synthesis are highlighted.


Metabolites ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 107
Author(s):  
Rafael de Felício ◽  
Patricia Ballone ◽  
Cristina Freitas Bazzano ◽  
Luiz F. G. Alves ◽  
Renata Sigrist ◽  
...  

Bacterial genome sequencing has revealed a vast number of novel biosynthetic gene clusters (BGC) with potential to produce bioactive natural products. However, the biosynthesis of secondary metabolites by bacteria is often silenced under laboratory conditions, limiting the controlled expression of natural products. Here we describe an integrated methodology for the construction and screening of an elicited and pre-fractionated library of marine bacteria. In this pilot study, chemical elicitors were evaluated to mimic the natural environment and to induce the expression of cryptic BGCs in deep-sea bacteria. By integrating high-resolution untargeted metabolomics with cheminformatics analyses, it was possible to visualize, mine, identify and map the chemical and biological space of the elicited bacterial metabolites. The results show that elicited bacterial metabolites correspond to ~45% of the compounds produced under laboratory conditions. In addition, the elicited chemical space is novel (~70% of the elicited compounds) or concentrated in the chemical space of drugs. Fractionation of the crude extracts further evidenced minor compounds (~90% of the collection) and the detection of biological activity. This pilot work pinpoints strategies for constructing and evaluating chemically diverse bacterial natural product libraries towards the identification of novel bacterial metabolites in natural product-based drug discovery pipelines.


Synthesis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dávid Roman ◽  
Maria Sauer ◽  
Christine Beemelmanns

Here, we have summarized more than 30 representative natural product syntheses published in 2015 to 2020 that employ one or more Horner-Wadsworth-Emmons (HWE) reactions. We comprehensively describe the applied phosphonate reagents, HWE reaction conditions and key steps of the total synthetic approaches. Our comprehensive review will support future synthetic approaches and serve as guideline to find the best HWE conditions for the most complicated natural products known


RSC Advances ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 2596-2607
Author(s):  
R. P. Vivek-Ananth ◽  
Ajaya Kumar Sahoo ◽  
Kavyaa Kumaravel ◽  
Karthikeyan Mohanraj ◽  
Areejit Samal

First dedicated manually curated resource on secondary metabolites and therapeutic uses of medicinal fungi. Cheminformatics based analysis of the chemical space of fungal natural products.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Grigalunas ◽  
Annina Burhop ◽  
Sarah Zinken ◽  
Axel Pahl ◽  
José-Manuel Gally ◽  
...  

AbstractNatural product structure and fragment-based compound development inspire pseudo-natural product design through different combinations of a given natural product fragment set to compound classes expected to be chemically and biologically diverse. We describe the synthetic combination of the fragment-sized natural products quinine, quinidine, sinomenine, and griseofulvin with chromanone or indole-containing fragments to provide a 244-member pseudo-natural product collection. Cheminformatic analyses reveal that the resulting eight pseudo-natural product classes are chemically diverse and share both drug- and natural product-like properties. Unbiased biological evaluation by cell painting demonstrates that bioactivity of pseudo-natural products, guiding natural products, and fragments differ and that combination of different fragments dominates establishment of unique bioactivity. Identification of phenotypic fragment dominance enables design of compound classes with correctly predicted bioactivity. The results demonstrate that fusion of natural product fragments in different combinations and arrangements can provide chemically and biologically diverse pseudo-natural product classes for wider exploration of biologically relevant chemical space.


Molecules ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 349
Author(s):  
Asim Najmi ◽  
Sadique A. Javed ◽  
Mohammed Al Bratty ◽  
Hassan A. Alhazmi

Natural products represents an important source of new lead compounds in drug discovery research. Several drugs currently used as therapeutic agents have been developed from natural sources; plant sources are specifically important. In the past few decades, pharmaceutical companies demonstrated insignificant attention towards natural product drug discovery, mainly due to its intrinsic complexity. Recently, technological advancements greatly helped to address the challenges and resulted in the revived scientific interest in drug discovery from natural sources. This review provides a comprehensive overview of various approaches used in the selection, authentication, extraction/isolation, biological screening, and analogue development through the application of modern drug-development principles of plant-based natural products. Main focus is given to the bioactivity-guided fractionation approach along with associated challenges and major advancements. A brief outline of historical development in natural product drug discovery and a snapshot of the prominent natural drugs developed in the last few decades are also presented. The researcher’s opinions indicated that an integrated interdisciplinary approach utilizing technological advances is necessary for the successful development of natural products. These involve the application of efficient selection method, well-designed extraction/isolation procedure, advanced structure elucidation techniques, and bioassays with a high-throughput capacity to establish druggability and patentability of phyto-compounds. A number of modern approaches including molecular modeling, virtual screening, natural product library, and database mining are being used for improving natural product drug discovery research. Renewed scientific interest and recent research trends in natural product drug discovery clearly indicated that natural products will play important role in the future development of new therapeutic drugs and it is also anticipated that efficient application of new approaches will further improve the drug discovery campaign.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Lam ◽  
M. C. Leech ◽  
A. J. J. Lennox

The multistep synthesis of natural products has historically served as a useful and informative platform for showcasing the best, state-of-the-art synthetic methodologies and technologies. Over the last several decades, electrochemistry has proved itself to be a useful tool for conducting redox reactions. This is primarily due to its unique ability to selectively apply any oxidizing or reducing potential to a sufficiently conductive reaction solution. Electrochemical redox reactions are readily scaled and can be more sustainable than competing strategies based on conventional redox reagents. In this chapter, we summarize the examples where electrochemistry has been used in the synthesis of natural products. The chapter is organized by the reaction type of the electrochemical step and covers both oxidative and reductive reaction modes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Satoshi Kawano ◽  
Ken Ito ◽  
Kenzo Yahata ◽  
Kazunobu Kira ◽  
Takanori Abe ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (10) ◽  
pp. 1934578X1988440
Author(s):  
Kenichi Kobayashi ◽  
Kosaku Tanaka ◽  
Momoko Suzuki ◽  
Hiroshi Kogen

A catalytic asymmetric intramolecular Darzens reaction of 2-halomalonate derivatives was developed for the enantioselective preparation of chiral building blocks for epoxide-containing natural products. Among the screened catalysts, some phase-transfer catalysts gave the desired epoxide in moderate enantioselectivity, albeit in low yield. The epoxide product would be useful as versatile chiral building blocks for natural product synthesis.


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