Dereplication and Partial Identification of Natural Products

Since the “Golden Age of Antibiotics” in the 1950s, natural products chemists have faced the steadily increasing problem of how to maximize the discovery of new compounds and minimize the re-evaluation of natural products already described in the literature. If a compound has been isolated, identified, and reported, it should be possible to use the published information to identify the compound when it appears again, without having to repeat the entire isolation and structure-determination process. In addition, in many instances, the questions being asked in a study can be answered simply by partial identification of the unknown structure. These complementary processes of rapid identification of known compounds from a partially purified mixture and identification of enough of an unknown structure to prioritize or conclude an isolation, have come to be termed “dereplication” by the natural products community.