Ignorant
of the New World, Europeans believed in El Dorado, a hidden city of
immense wealth in gold. Many consider the Amazonian forest to be a
medicinal treasure chest and potentially the largest drug dispensary in
the world. Yet, the quest to obtain drugs from indigenous tropical
plants remains elusive. Here, we assess the potential of new
technologies to tap into the metabolic diversity of tropical plants. We
also consider how regulations affect access to plant resources. We
conclude that, although the road to this medicinal El Dorado may be long
and arduous, many other smaller but still valuable finds are hidden
along the way.
Trends
Metabolomics
can speed up the identification of natural product scaffolds used in
combinatorial chemistry, thus expanding the value of combinatorial
chemistry libraries.
Improved efficiency of dereplication toolkits is likely to accelerate drug discovery.
Novel methods to track protein–metabolite interactions in a cell-wide manner can be exploited to assist natural drug discovery.
Genetic
engineering can help to reconstitute plant biosynthetic pathways in
simple organisms, such as yeast, thus overcoming supply problems with
natural products.
Keywords
- bioprospecting;
- Amazon;
- metabolomics;
- interactomics;
- chemoinformatics
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
