Congratulations to Julio Ng (front) and Nuno Bandeira (back), the UC San Diego researchers and co-lead authors on a Nature Methods paper describing computational and experimental advances that enable researchers to quickly and inexpensively determine whether natural compounds collected in oceans and forests are new -- or if these pharmaceutically promising compounds have already been described and are therefore not patentable.The UC San Diego web-based tools for sequencing nonribosomal peptides (at no cost to researchers at nonprofit organizations) are available at: bix.ucsd.edu/nrp
This research appeared this week on a number of media outlets, including:
Scientific American (story by Brendan Borrell)
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=new-algorithm-antibiotic-hunt
Genetic Engineering News
ttp://www.genengnews.com/news/bnitem.aspx?name=58159197
Natural Products Industry Insider http://www.naturalproductsinsider.com/news/2009/07/new-drugs-faster-from-natural-compounds.aspx
Genome Web Daily News
http://www.genomeweb.com/proteomics/ucsd-team-develops-de-novo-sequencing-dereplication-method-decipher-nonribosomal
