Artificial intelligence helps to find new natural substances

More than a third of all medicines available today are based on active substances from nature, and a research team from the University of Jena has developed a procedure to identify small active substance molecules much more quickly and easily. Secondary natural substances that occur in numerous plants, bacteria and fungi can be anti-inflammatory, can ward off pathogens or even prevent the growth of cancer cells. However, making use of the riches provided by nature’s medicine cabinet and identifying new natural substances is time-consuming, costly and labor-intensive. A team of bioinformaticians at Friedrich Schiller University Jena has now developed a method that enables much faster and easier identification of small active substance molecules. The researchers present their method, called COSMIC (Confidence Of Small Molecule IdentifiCations), in the current issue of Nature Biotechnology.


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Source: Phys.org