The Chemistry Department offers its expertise in natural products research to solve problems associated to the identification and purification of natural products. The experience of our team in international industrial research allows the parallel handling of large numbers of complex microbial extracts for the discovery of new Natural Products in a highly efficient, cost-effective manner.

Natural Products Chemistry

Metabolomic studies of natural product extracts

LC/MS based metabolomic analysis of samples for the identification of biomarkers associated to changes in composition of natural extracts.

LC/MS and NMR based dereplication of known natural products

Dereplication of components in extracts and fractions using LC/HRMS and internal and commercial databases
Dereplication of compounds in pure or semi-purified fractions by NMR.

Preparation of extracts

Solvent extraction of microbial cultures or natural samples.
Ad-hoc development of protocols for the extraction of selected components in a natural product extracts or mixture
Solid phase extraction (SPE) of culture broths of microorganisms

Chromatographic fractionation of natural extracts

Chromatographic fractionation of extracts for the isolation of natural products of interest
Wide range of approaches including the use of normal and reverse phase chromatography, gel filtration and polystirenic resins
HPLC purification as final step of the process.

Semipreparative and preparative HPLC

HPLC separation of extracts or complex mixtures of molecules
Wide range of columns and chromatographic adsorbents
Semi-preparative and preparative columns for the separation of variable amounts of sample.

NMR and HRMS based structural elucidation of new Natural Products

Acquisition of HRMS and NMR experiments necessary for the structural elucidation of new molecules
Interpretation of spectra
Structural elucidation of complex molecules isolated even in submilligram quantities.