Adriano Rutz

ETH Zurich | ETH Zürich · Institute of Molecular Systems Biology

Mass spectrometry (MS) offers unrivalled sensitivity for the metabolite profiling of complex biological matrices encountered in natural products (NP) research. The massive and complex sets of spectral data generated by such platforms require computational approaches for their interpretation. Within such approaches, computational metabolite annotati...

Contemporary bioinformatic and chemoinformatic capabilities hold promise to reshape knowledge management, analysis and interpretation of data in natural products research. Currently, reliance on a disparate set of non-standardized, insular, and specialized databases presents a series of challenges for data access, both within the discipline and for...

The detailed assessment of the composition of plant-derived products is of primary interest. The metabolites in natural extracts (NE) constitute the metabolome, which can be divided into the core and the specialized metabolome. Plants produce specialized metabolites to ensure their survival in a competitive environment. To assess the composition of...

MicrobeMASST, a taxonomically-informed mass spectrometry (MS) search tool, tackles limited microbial metabolite annotation in untargeted metabolomics experiments. Leveraging a curated database of >60,000 microbial monocultures, users can search known and unknown MS/MS spectra and link them to their respective microbial producers via MS/MS fragmenta...

MicrobeMASST, a taxonomically-informed mass spectrometry (MS) search tool, tackles limited microbial metabolite annotation in untargeted metabolomics experiments. Leveraging a curated database of >60,000 microbial monocultures, users can search known and unknown MS/MS spectra and link them to their respective microbial producers via MS/MS fragmenta...

Modern natural products (NPs) research relies on untargeted liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry metabolomics. Together with cutting-edge processing and computational annotation strategies, such approaches can yield extensive spectral and structural information. However, current processing workflows require feature-alignment steps b...

Alzatea verticillata Ruiz & Pav. (Alzateaceae) is a tropical tree from Central and South America. It is the only living species of Alzatea genus and the Alzateaceae family, all others being extinct. With the aim to investigate the possibility to find unusual natural products, the chemical content of the dichloromethane and methanolic extracts (stem...

As privileged structures, natural products often display potent biological activities. However, the discovery of novel bioactive scaffoldsis often hampered by the chemical complexity of the biological matrices they are found in. Large natural extract collections are thusextremely valuable for their chemical novelty potential but also complicated to...

Metabolomics is playing an increasingly prominent role in chemical ecology and in the discovery of bioactive natural products (NPs). The identification of metabolites is a common/central objective in both research fields. NPs have significant biological properties and play roles in multiple chemical-ecological interactions. Classically, in pharmaco...

The standardized identification of biomedical entities is a cornerstone of interoperability, reuse, and data integration in the life sciences. Several registries have been developed to catalog resources maintaining identifiers for biomedical entities such as small molecules, proteins, cell lines, and clinical trials. However, existing registries ha...

Collections of natural extracts hold potential for the discovery of novel natural products with original modes of action. The prioritization of extracts from collections remains challenging due to the lack of a workflow that combines multiple-source information to facilitate the data interpretation. Results from different analytical techniques and...

Collections of natural extracts hold potential for the discovery of novel natural products with original modes of action. The prioritization of extracts from collections remains challenging due to the lack of workflow that combines multiple-source information to facilitate the data interpretation. Results from different analysis techniques and lite...

The standardized identification of biomedical entities is a cornerstone of interoperability, reuse, and data integration in the life sciences. Several registries have been developed to catalog resources maintaining identifiers for biomedical entities such as small molecules, proteins, cell lines, and clinical trials. However, existing registries ha...

The discovery of bioactive natural products remains a time-consuming and challenging task. The ability to link high-confidence metabolite annotations in crude extracts with activity would be highly beneficial to the drug discovery process. To address this challenge, HPLC-based activity profiling and advanced UHPLC-HRMS/MS metabolite profiling for a...

Natural remedies are used as stand-alone treatments or as additives to modern medicine to control hyperglycemia. Here, we investigate the antidiabetic potential of the Palauan traditional leaf decoction of Phaleria nisidai (PNe) using a reverse pharmacology approach. In diet induced obese mice, dietary supplementation with PNe improves insulin sens...

Pigments of fungi are a fertile ground of inspiration: they spread across various chemical backbones, absorption ranges, and bioactivities. However, basidiomycetes with strikingly colored fruiting bodies have never been explored as agents for photodynamic therapy (PDT), even though known photoactive compound classes (e.g., anthraquinones or alkaloi...

With the recent explosion of information, Natural Products (NP) research critically needs efficient ways to access and share knowledge, also to save precious knowledge being lost [1]. The reporting and sharing of NP occurrences in biological organisms are relevant to numerous scientific fields ranging from drug discovery to chemical ecology or chem...

Bitterness, among all tastes, is the most difficult to decipher. Reasons are the chemical diversity of bitter-tasting compounds and the heterogeneous sensory response among the population. The very high bitterness sensitivity is further challenging regarding analytical methods. However, because of its pharmacological relevance, methodological devel...

Fungi have developed a wide array of defense strategies to overcome mechanical injuries and pathogen infections. Recently, photoactivity has been discovered by showing that pigments isolated from Cortinarius uliginosus produce singlet oxygen under irradiation. To test if this phenomenon is limited to dermocyboid Cortinarii, six colourful Cortinariu...

Repurposed drugs have been evaluated for the management of clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC), but only a few have influenced the overall survival of patients with advanced disease. To combine repurposed non-oncology with oncological drugs, we applied our validated phenotypic method, which consisted of a reduced experimental part and data mode...

Resistance in clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) against sunitinib is a multifaceted process encompassing numerous molecular aberrations. This induces clinical complications, reducing the treatment success. Understanding these aberrations helps us to select an adapted treatment strategy that surpasses resistance mechanisms, reverting the treat...

Contemporary bioinformatic and chemoinformatic capabilities hold promise to reshape knowledge management, analysis and interpretation of data in natural products research. Currently, reliance on a disparate set of non-standardized, insular, and specialized databases presents a series of challenges to data access, either within the discipline or to...

p> Pigments of mushrooms are a fertile ground of inspiration: they spread across various chemical backbones, absorption ranges, and bioactivities. While looking from a photochemical perspective, we discovered a new bioactivity, i.e., photoactivity. We revealed that singlet oxygen production is a common theme in one group of webcaps (i.e., dermocybo...

Black dot is a blemish disease of potato tubers caused by the phytopathogenic fungus Colletotrichum coccodes. Qualitative resistance (monogenic) that leads to the hypersensitive response has not been reported against black dot, but commercial potato cultivars show different susceptibility levels to the disease, indicating that quantitative resistan...

Niedenzuella multiglandulosa (Malpighiaceae) is a neotropical liana responsible for cattle intoxication outbreaks in Brazil that may lead to abortion and even death of the animals, causing substantial losses in Brazilian trade balance. A phytochemical study of N. multiglandulosa leaves was performed in order to obtain chemical information about sec...

Ethnopharmacological relevance Ethnopharmacological data and ancient texts support the use of black hellebore (Helleborus odorus subsp. cyclophyllus, Ranunculaceae) for the management and treatment of epilepsy in ancient Greece. Aim of the study A pharmacological investigation of the root methanolic extract (RME) was conducted using the zebrafish...

Poster presented at the 67th International Congress and Annual Meeting of the Society for Medicinal Plant and Natural Product Research

Mass spectrometry (MS) offers unrivalled sensitivity for the metabolite profiling of complex biological matrices encountered in natural products (NP) research. The massive and complex sets of spectral data generated by such platforms require computational approaches for their interpretation. Within such approaches, computational metabolite annotati...

The dichloromethane extract of the root bark of the Panamanian plant Cordia anisophylla J.S. Mill. (Boraginaceae) presented antifungal activity against a susceptible strain of Candida albicans in a bioautography primary screening. The susceptible strain was used to detect minor active compounds that would not have been detected using a classical ap...