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Updated: Jan 14, 2026
Mass Spectrometry-Guided Genome Mining as a Tool to Uncover Novel Natural Products
Published on: March 12, 2020
Machine-Readable Structural Information Is Essential for Natural Products Research
Karin Steffen1, Nicholas H Oberlies2, Antonis Rokas1
1Department of Biological Sciences and Evolutionary Studies Initiative, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 37235, United States.
None:
Structural drawings of secondary metabolites encapsulate a wealth of information, but their static nature hinders their sharing and reuse. At a time when research increasingly relies on, and benefits from, access to comprehensive natural products "big data", this hindrance is contrary to the norms of science. This Perspective discusses current challenges in sharing and accessing structure data and offers a simple solution, namely, publishing machine-readable text descriptors for new secondary metabolites. Requiring such descriptors will be straightforward to implement for both authors and publishers and will help derive even greater value from the efforts expended to understand the chemistry of Nature.
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