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. The common pain reliever aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) was first produced in the 19th century and is famously derived from willow bark extract, a medicine that was described in clay tablets thousands of years ago. After a new method of synthesis was discovered, and after it had been used around the world for almost 70 years, scientists were finally able to understand how it works. This was a long historical process, and while plants remain an almost infinite resource for drug discovery and biotechnology, thousands of years is no longer an acceptable time frame.