Plant-derived natural products have long been considered a valuable source of lead compounds for drug development. Natural extracts are usually composed of hundreds to thousands of metabolites, whereby the bioactivity of natural extracts can be represented by synergism between several metabolites. However, isolating every single compound from a natural extract is not always possible due to the complex chemistry and presence of most secondary metabolites at very low levels. Metabolomics has emerged in recent years as an indispensable tool for the analysis of thousands of metabolites from crude natural extracts, leading to a paradigm shift in natural products drug research. Analytical methods such as mass spectrometry (MS) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) are used to comprehensively annotate the constituents of plant natural products for screening, drug discovery as well as for quality control purposes such as those required for phytomedicine. In this review, the current advancements in plant sample preparation, sample measurements, and data analysis are presented alongside a few case studies of the successful applications of these processes in plant natural product drug discovery.

中文翻译：

---

植物天然产物研究中的代谢组学：从样品制备到代谢物分析。

长期以来，植物来源的天然产物一直被认为是药物开发中铅化合物的宝贵来源。天然提取物通常由数百至数千种代谢物组成，因此天然提取物的生物活性可以通过几种代谢物之间的协同作用来表示。但是，由于复杂的化学反应以及大多数次生代谢物的含量非常低，从天然提取物中分离出每种化合物并不总是可能的。近年来，代谢组学已经成为分析粗天然提取物中成千上万种代谢产物的必不可少的工具，从而导致了天然产物药物研究的范式转变。质谱（MS）和核磁共振（NMR）等分析方法用于全面注释植物天然产物的成分，以进行筛选，药物发现以及质量控制，例如植物药所必需的成分。在这篇综述中，介绍了植物样品制备，样品测量和数据分析的最新进展，以及在植物天然产物药物发现中成功应用这些工艺的一些案例研究。