High‐Throughput Screening of Plant Chemodiversity

Abstract

Issues related to high throughput screening (HTS) of plant chemodiversity are presented. This technology initially used in the pharmaceutical drug discovery domain is based on the testing of large sets of substances on selected biological targets in a limited period of time. Interest in plant natural compounds, access to biodiversity, and procedures of sharing benefits with the source countries are discussed. Then, procedures to adapt the potency of HTS to the exploration of the quasi‐unlimited richness of plant are detailed considering the specificities of these particular samples. Target identification, assay development and automation, screening setup, and control and hit analysis are described. Examples of plant extract library building, screening systems, high throughput assay principles, fully automated protocols, screening result profiles, typical problems, and hit selection criteria are provided to highlight these concepts. Finally, importance of plant screening is discussed within academia and pharmaceutical laboratories, and new trends are introduced.

Leaf metabolic traits reveal hidden dimensions of plant form and function

“…We used two existing datasets describing the leaf metabolomes of tropical and temperate plant species (as the unit of observation). The tropical dataset originated from a random subsample of tropical leaves from the Pierre Fabre Sample Library 68 , which is an archive of ~17000 plant samples from in situ communities around the globe that was originally collected for drug discovery and is a registered collection of the European Union (registration code: 03-FR-2020) 69 . Samples were oven-dried (55 °C for 3 d) and extracted using overnight maceration (8 g sample; 80 mL ethyl acetate).…”

Leaf metabolic traits reveal hidden dimensions of plant form and function

“…We used two existing datasets describing the leaf metabolomes of tropical and temperate plant species (as the unit of observation). The tropical dataset originated from a random subsample of tropical leaves from the Pierre Fabre Sample Library (69), which is an archive of ~17,000 plant samples from in situ communities around the globe that was originally collected for drug discovery and is a registered collection of the European Union (registration code: 03-FR-2020) (70). Samples were oven-dried (55°C for 3 days) and extracted using overnight maceration (8 g of sample and 80 ml of ethyl acetate).…”