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A chemoinformatic analysis of atoms, scaffolds and functional groups in natural products

  • Joelle Ngo Hanna , Boris D. Bekono , Luc C. O. Owono , Flavien A. A. Toze , James A. Mbah , Stefan Günther and Fidele Ntie-Kang EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: June 29, 2021
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Abstract

In the quest to know why natural products (NPs) have often been considered as privileged scaffolds for drug discovery purposes, many investigations into the differences between NPs and synthetic compounds have been carried out. Several attempts to answer this question have led to the investigation of the atomic composition, scaffolds and functional groups (FGs) of NPs, in comparison with synthetic drugs analysis. This chapter briefly describes an atomic enumeration method for chemical libraries that has been applied for the analysis of NP libraries, followed by a description of the main differences between NPs of marine and terrestrial origin in terms of their general physicochemical properties, most common scaffolds and “drug-likeness” properties. The last parts of the work describe an analysis of scaffolds and FGs common in NP libraries, focusing on huge NP databases, e.g. those in the Dictionary of Natural Products (DNP), NPs from cyanobacteria and the largest chemical class of NP – terpenoids.


The authors JNH and BDB contributed equally and should be regarded as joint co-authors.


Acknowledgements

FNK acknowledges a return fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt accompanied by BDB and JNH. FNK would also like to acknowledge the European Structural and Investment Funds, OP RDE-funded project ‘ChemJets’ (No. CZ.02.2.69/0.0/0.0/16_027/0008351).

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Published Online: 2021-06-29

© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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