Chemical Library

At the RIKEN Natural Products Depository (NPDepo) we continue to construct chemical libraries based on natural products chemistry. We have collected derivatives and analogues of natural products as well as isolated secondary metabolites of actinomycetes and filamentous fungi, along with drug-like synthetic compounds, and prepared a library of around 40,000 compounds. Among over 200,000 compounds we have so far provided, many protein binding compounds, inhibitors of protein functions, and so on, were found.

In the year 2009 we initiated the construction of two types of libraries, i.e., Authentic Library and Pilot Library, to support an efficient screening. In the year 2016 we started provision of the compounds selected from hit compounds and their analogues. A standard provision for each compound is set at a concentration of 10 mg/mL in 5 µL of dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO).

Authentic Library

The Authentic Library consists of 80 compounds with previously known biological activities. Some of these compounds are used as antibiotics, antitumor drugs, anti-inflammatory drugs, and others retain protein synthesis inhibitory activity, adrenocortical hormone-like activity, and so on. The Authentic Library can be exploited to validate newly established assay systems. It is also useful for performing screenings together with the Pilot Library below

Pilot Library

Using cheminformatics we have classified around 25,000 of provisional compounds into 400 clusters. Each cluster contains compounds with the same skeleton or a common substructure. From each cluster, a compound which typically symbolises the cluster is chosen. We then assembled these typical compounds into a Pilot Library. As a result, compounds’ structures are different from one another, and that makes our Pilot library rich in structural diversity as a whole.

If you found hit compounds from the Pilot Library through initial screening, we would provide you with the hit compounds, their derivatives, analogues, and compounds in the same cluster. This way, you will be able to find compounds with higher activities.