Mission

Understand better the small molecules of the living world.

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Background

Secondary metabolites from natural sources across the phylogenetic tree have always played an important role in physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology, drug discovery and pharmaceutical analysis. Their separation, analysis and pharmacological evaluation are core elements of modern pharmacognosy, representing an interdisciplinary field of research. Insight into the overwhelming complexity of the total pool of secondary metabolites produced by any single organism (metabolome) requires development of specialized (bio)-analytical techniques such as countercurrent chromatography (CCC) and quantitative NMR (qNMR). This requirement continues to hold for those metabolites that today are classified as 'small molecules', which open the door to an incredibly large and very important part of nature's chemical space. The achievement of separation, reliable structure dereplication, qualitative and quantitative elucidation, and significant biological evaluation are the synergistic key steps in successful metabolome research. Thus, separation generates structure and creates knowledge.