What’s in this plant? The best automated system for finding potential drugs

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS) in Japan have developed a new computational mass-spectrometry system for identifying metabolomes—entire sets of metabolites for different living organisms. When the new method was tested on select tissues from 12 plant species, it was able to note over 1000 metabolites. Among them were dozens that had never been found before, including those with antibiotic and anti-cancer potential.