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Natural products discovery needs improved taxonomic and geographic information.
Journal article

Natural products discovery needs improved taxonomic and geographic information.

  • Leal MC Department of Fish Ecology and Evolution, Eawag: Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Center for Ecology, Evolution and Biogeochemistry, Kastanienbaum, Switzerland. miguelcleal@gmail.com.
  • Hilário A Departamento de Biologia & CESAM, Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal.
  • Munro MH Department of Chemistry, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.
  • Blunt JW Department of Chemistry, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.
  • Calado R Departamento de Biologia & CESAM, Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal.
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  • 2016-02-20
Published in:
  • Natural product reports. - 2016
Biodiversity
Biological Products
Molecular Structure
Reproducibility of Results
English Covering: up to 2016Marine and terrestrial organisms yield a remarkable chemical diversity and are important sources for discovery of new chemical products. In order to maximize the bioprospecting efficiency of natural products (NP), taxonomy, geography and biodiversity are starting to be used to draw conclusions on which taxonomic groups and/or regions may be of interest for future research. However, accurate taxonomic information and sampling location of source organisms have often been overlooked. Although these issues were already reported a few decades ago and improvements have been made, such outstanding problems are still recurrent in recent peer-reviewed literature. Here, we focus on the importance of taxonomic and geographic identification of source material and illustrate how taxonomic and geographic data of source organisms continues to be poorly handled. It is our opinion that this issue needs to be discussed within the NP community with the ultimate goal of improving publication standards and guaranteeing the scientific principle of research reproducibility. Moreover, by doing so, it will be possible to take advantage of information available in the literature to develop cross-disciplinary meta-analyses that may help to advance the state of the art of NP research and future bioprospecting endeavours.
Language
  • English
Open access status
hybrid
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/global/documents/163013
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