Advanced Methods for Natural Products Discovery

Funding Information: This publication is based upon work from COST Action CA18238 (Ocean4Biotech), funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Program in the period 2019–2023. SPG: This work is financed by national funds from FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., in the scope of the project LA/P/0140/2020 of the Associate Laboratory Institute for Health and Bioeconomy—i4HB. LLB: The publication is part of a project that has received funding from the Erasmus + Project No. ECOBIAS_609967-EPP-1-2019-1-RS-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP; GA.2019-1991/001-001. Development of master curricula in ecological monitoring and aquatic bioassessment for Western Balkans HEIs/ECOBIAS. CJ: This work was supported by grants PID2021-122732OB-C22 from MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER “A way to make Europe” (AEI, Spanish State Agency for Research and FEDER Programme from the European Union) and RTI2018-093634-B-C22 from the State Agency for Research (AEI) of Spain, co-funded by the FEDER Programme from the European Union, and BLUEBIOLAB (0474_BLUEBIOLAB_1_E), Programme INTERREG V A of Spain-Portugal (POCTEP). FP: This work is financed by national funds from FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., for an Assistant Research Position (CEECIND/01649/2021). MC: INTERREG-MAC2/1.1b/279 (AHIDAGRO) and the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Spain) (grant PID2020-115979RR-C32). ARDM is supported with funds from Proyecto Intramural Especial CSIC [Ref. 202280I032]. Publisher Copyright: © 2023 by the authors. Natural Products (NP) are essential for the discovery of novel drugs and products for numerous biotechnological applications. The NP discovery process is expensive and time-consuming, having as major hurdles dereplication (early identification of known compounds) and structure elucidation, particularly the determination of the absolute configuration of metabolites with stereogenic centers. This review comprehensively focuses on recent technological and instrumental advances, highlighting the development of methods that alleviate these obstacles, paving the way for accelerating NP discovery towards biotechnological applications. Herein, we emphasize the most innovative high-throughput tools and methods for advancing bioactivity screening, NP chemical analysis, dereplication, metabolite profiling, metabolomics, genome sequencing and/or genomics approaches, databases, bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, and three-dimensional NP structure elucidation. publishersversion published