Overview
The plants have potential to synthesize a wide variety of chemical compounds that can be used to perform important biological functions. But, the chemical diversity of bioactive compounds or their derivatives in higher plants are not extensively explored and a few amount of the world’s biodiversity has been tested for biological activity. Thus, the discovery of known bioactive compounds from previously unknown sources is a vital part of the discovery process that saves time and resources.
Over the past decades, high performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) has revolutionized analytical chemistry. The hyphenated MS techniques not only report the precise mass of compounds but also generate fragment ion spectra for identification /confirmation of compounds. This fragmentation pattern offers a unique molecular signature of organic compounds. As a result, web-based LC-MS/MS library of plant secondary metabolites with suitable software search algorithm serves the purpose of inverse search (distribution of known bioactive compounds in different plant species).
The designed and developed database explores the following possibility using LC-MS and LC-MS/MS data.
- Identification of plant species based on their chemical fingerprint.
- Discovery of known bioactive compounds from previously unknown sources.
- Distribution of known compounds in different biological source (Plants/herbs).
- Identification of known/unknown derivatives of bioactive compounds in different biological source (Plants/herbs)
- Evaluation of herbal drug/formulation composition based on plants chemical fingerprint.