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A myriad of infectious diseases continue to cause the death and suffering of millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa. Efforts to mitigate this suffering involve, among others, concerted efforts at discovering and developing new and more efficacious therapies for these diseases. To support these efforts, the full potential of Africa’s rich and vibrant biodiversity as a source of lead compounds and drug candidates needs to be harnessed. This would require a complete reevaluation of how natural product drug discovery is conducted on the continent, and in this chapter, we describe some of the components that could underpin this proposed transformation.

Metaboloinformatics can be considered as derivation of knowledge from computer analysis of metabolomite resources. Metabolomics is the systematic analysis of thousands of non peptide small compounds such as sugars, fatty acids, vitamins etc. at the cellular and tissue level of a living organism. Using metabolomic technologies, researchers are able to systematically determine metabolite concentration in a sample. These developing technologies have the potential of being applied in the areas of drug discovery and development and preventive screening/diagnostics. In this paper, we identify the issues and challenges in metaboloinformatic data management. We also discuss how the gRNA can be used to address some the challenges in this field.

The area of natural products research is the most rapidly growing field of organic chemistry. Owing to the worldwide intensive research and the great technical developments in the isolation and identification techniques today, near to one million products — isolated from the most diverse living things — are known (see Fig.l). The total number of natural compounds with clearly defined biological activity is near to 100,000, including more than ten thousand bio-active microbial products. The largest family of these microbial compounds is the group of anti-biotic and anti-tumor compounds numbered around eight thousand. The number of other bio-active natural products, isolated mainly from higher plants is also tremendous including almost 5000 anti-microbial and anti-tumor compounds.