Scaffold Diversity of Fungal Metabolites

UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
Tamam M. El-Elimat (Creator)
Mario Figueroa Saldivar, Adjunct Faculty (Creator)
Nicholas Oberlies, Patricia A. Sullivan Distinguished Professor of Chemistry (Creator)
Cedric J Pearce, Adjunct Professor (Creator)
Institution
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/

Abstract: Many drug discovery projects rely on commercial compounds to discover active leads. However, current commercial libraries, with mostly synthetic compounds, access a small fraction of the possible chemical diversity. Natural products, in contrast, possess a vast structural diversity and have proven to be an outstanding source of new drugs. Several chemoinformatic analyses of natural products have demonstrated their diversity and structural complexity. However, to our knowledge, the scaffold content and structural diversity of fungal secondary metabolites have never been studied. Herein, the scaffold diversity of 223 fungal metabolites was measured and compared to the diversity of approved drugs and commercial libraries for HTS containing natural, synthetic, and semi-synthetic compounds. In addition, the global diversity of the fungal isolates was assessed and compared to other reference data sets using Consensus Diversity Plots, a chemoinformatic tool recently developed. It was concluded that fungal secondary metabolites are cyclic systems with few ramifications and more diverse than the commercial libraries with natural products and semi-synthetic compounds. The fungal metabolites data set was one of the most structurally diverse, containing a large proportion of different and unique scaffolds not found in the other compound data sets including ChEMBL. Therefore, fungal metabolites offer a rich source of molecules suited for identifying diverse candidates for drug discovery.

Additional Information

Publication
Frontiers in Pharmacology, 8, 180
Language: English
Date: 2017
Keywords
chemical space, cheminformatics, consensus diversity plots, generative topographic mapping, molecular diversity, natural products, fungal metabolites

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