LAUSR

Natural products are an undoubtedly reliable and robust source of biomolecules for pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and nutraceuticals. Their value as a chemical platform lies greatly in the range of structural diversity they offer. This diversity, while an advantage, implies that to fully exploit the bounties of this source, the experimental design must consider the variability of potentially interesting compounds and the fact that they are often immersed in complex chemical environments. Furthermore, revealing the activity and mechanism of action of new biomolecules can be challenging due to the vast spectrum of biosystems involved. Therefore, the key Research Topic in this field is how to handle the complexity of these chemical and biological networks in organisms and use them to our advantage. Metabolomics, with its holistic and comprehensive approach, is well-suited for this purpose. In recent years, systems biology has become a widely accepted paradigm in life sciences research. The data generated from metabolomics provides valuable information which integrated with all other “omics” data allows the investigation of biological processes from this holistic approach. The goal of metabolomics is to work out a biological or physiological phenomenon based on data obtained from chemical profiling of the metabolome. In recent decades, the impressive technological advances in the analytical platforms required for metabolomics have allowed increased sensitivity, data robustness and resolution, which together with new sample preparation techniques and the development of data processing and mining methods have widened the range and scope of the field resulting in successful nature-based drug development and the investigation of their mechanisms. In this context, the global aim of this Research Topic is to cover all metabolomics-based applications and methods directed at the discovery of useful biomolecules from natural sources, and the mechanisms of their bioactivity. For this, we have selected these eight articles that represent current research trends of the application of metabolomics: