Show me your structures!

The second scientific course ‘Natural product isolation, metabolomics and structural elucidation’ has been held in the beautiful city of Granada, Spain, by host institution Fundación Medina. This course was in collaboration with Magic-MolFun, a MSCA doctoral network that focusses on training specialists in combining wet-lab and computational skills to optimize the research on natural products. Before the official start of the course, all PhD candidates met up in the evening to meet the participants of Magic-MolFun to get to know each other and their research.

From the 26th till the 28th of June 2024, the course was ongoing with diverse and interesting lectures about the isolation of natural products, how to enhance chemical diversity, the basics of using mass spectrometry for dereplication in combination with data processing tool usage, as well as structure elucidation with NMR spectroscopy and crystallography. Besides this, the candidates were divided into groups to work on their structure elucidation skills by trying to identify molecular structures of previously discovered natural products by using their NMR data.

Thanks to Prof. Marcel Jaspars, Dr. Rainer Ebel, Dr. Katherine Duncan, Dr Justin van der Hooft, Dr. Chambers C. Hughes, Dr. Rubén Tormo, Dr. Daniel Oves-Costales, and Jesús Martín for their contribution to the course.

And a special thanks to Dr. Fernando Reyes for arranging this educational course, giving us a tour through the lab facilities of Fundación Medina, and suggesting the perfect restaurants to enjoy the Spanish cuisine!

Kim and Martin