UC Berkeley

Natural products have been utilized by humans since the beginning of recorded history. Some of the first documented uses of these compounds comes in the form of plant-based extracts and mixtures of various poultices for a wide range of medicinal uses. Natural product small molecule discovery serves as an essential pipeline for novel therapeutics, improves our understanding of human disease, and supplies innovative chemistries for the synthesis and derivatization of compounds. This work will be split amongst the development and application of natural product discovery methodologies (Chapters 2 and 3) and the combination of existing methodologies to discover molecules pertinent to disease (Chapters 4 and 5). Each of these chapters will deal with the discovery, identification, purification, and characterization of small molecules with a key focus on metabolomics as a focal tool.