Developments in hyphenated spectroscopic methods in natural product profiling

Overviews of the principal techniques that have found application in the profiling of natural products are given, including advances in capillary and column trapping LC-NMR-MS. Single hyphenated spectroscopic techniques, like LC-NMR and LC-MS, currently offer robust and efficient approaches for the rapid dereplication of natural product extracts. Multiple hyphenation techniques, such as (HP)LC-UV-NMR-MS-FTIR, now give an effective and comprehensive method for the deconvolution of complex mixtures. Ongoing improvements include miniaturization and cryogenic NMR probes and the hyphenation to capillary scale LC separations to analyse smaller quantities of samples. Extensions in hyphenation techniques required for natural product and other drug discovery programs include the need for LC-13C NMR and the combination of bioassays with already well-established hyphenated separationspectroscopic techniques, coupled with automated database searching capabilities (data libraries for LC, UV, NMR, MS and other search criteria).