Discovering New Natural Products Using Metabolomics-Based Approaches

The incessant search for new natural molecules with biological activities has forced researchers in the field of chemistry of natural products to seek different approaches for their prospection studies. In particular, researchers around the world are turning to approaches in metabolomics to avoid high rates of re-isolation of certain compounds, something recurrent in this branch of science. Thanks to the development of new technologies in the analytical instrumentation of spectroscopic and spectrometric techniques, as well as the advance in the computational processing modes of the results, metabolomics has been gaining more and more space in studies that involve the prospection of natural products. Thus, this chapter summarizes the precepts and good practices in the metabolomics of microbial natural products using mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and also summarizes several examples where this approach has been applied in the discovery of bioactive molecules.