Fast metabolite profiles and their data analysis for the prospective study and quality control of plants of pharmaceutical interest (FWOAL817)

Most drugs are either natural, e.g. phytomedicines, or inspired by products from natural sources. About half of the drugs commercialized are based on natural products. Therefore modern approaches enhancing the success of discovering new bioactive compounds, as well as new methods improving the quality assurance of marketed herbal products are of great interest. In this sense, chemometric tools associated with metabolite profiles (fingerprints) may create alternative approaches in the phytomedicines field. Taking into account that chemometric methodologies to study natural products are limitedly developed, this project aims applying such approach in two areas: bioprospection and quality control of herbal products. The issues addressed provide possibilities to search new bioactive molecules, potential candidates to develop new drugs, as well as to establish new perspectives for the quality assurance of phytomedicines. Developing new approaches to study medicinal plants is strategic and a topic converging expertise from different sciences. Using proper chemometric tools to extract information from fingerprints is crucial. The goals of this project are developing fingerprints containing the required information; treating the data properly and extracting the relevant information in the contexts of searching for bioactive compounds, and the identification and quality assurance of botanical products. For the latter, similarity analyses will be compared with classification methods.

Keywords:Metabolite

Disciplines:Pharmacognosy