Metabolomics and Bioactive Natural Products
. Natural products are a vital source for drug discovery. Conventional approaches taken to identify novel bioactive compounds via fractionation of compound of interest, isolation, and identification can be time-consuming and labor-intensive.
. The rapid identification of bioactive compounds in the natural extract is a challenge because of the complexity of chemical composition in the extract. Metabolomics can fulfill this point due to the ability of the multivariate analysis that can distinguish metabolites in numerous samples related to their biological activity. In this study, we aim at the discovery of the bioactive compounds, i.e., steroid 5 alpha reductase (S5AR) inhibitors from teak leaf extract, to investigate the factors affected on the S5AR inhibitory activity using LC/MS-based metabolomics approach. The work can be extended to the finding of bioactive compounds from other plants.
. In addition to LC-MS/MS, we also introduce a high-resolution ion mobility mass spectrometry (HR-IMS-MS)-based metabolomics to collect Collision Cross Section (CSS), which is highly specific to a compound. The CCS along with other molecular information obtained from the HR-IMS-MS, i.e., retention time, accurate mass, MS/MS fragmentation, and isotopic mass measurement, will greatly improve accuracy and precision in metabolite identification. The development of natural product database containing the comprehensive molecular data will help improve the quality of metabolite identification in natural products. Subsequently, the in-house natural product library along with metabolomics methodologies will be applied to identify and quantify metabolites in plants of the Rhamnaceae and Guttiferae families, with the focus on Ventilago harmandiana and from Garcinia speciosa. Likewise, the Global Natural Product Social Molecular Networking (GNPS), the largest publicly available natural product database, will be used to identify unknown features (metabolites) from Ventilago harmandiana and Garcinia speciosa.
. Metabolomics and multi-omics analyses (i.e., genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics (will be performed by our partner)) will provide a blueprint for how the plants biosynthesize these bioactive compounds. Thus, the success of this project is particularly important for the foundation of synthetic biology research of natural products in Thailand and worldwide.
