Turning metabolomics into drug discovery

Abstract

Metabolomics is the "omics" that studies the whole metabolome. It has a wide range of applications, inter alia chemotaxonomy, environmental influences, agriculture, etc. Here we review the application of metabolomics in natural product research. The importance of physicochemical properties to drug delivery are discussed in relation to turning metabolomic studies towards drug discovery. We believe that coupling metabolomic studies with standards of known physicochemical properties in order to calibrate the chromatographic columns can be beneficial in identifying compounds of candidate drug quality.