Concept – objectives

The aim of the project is to discover and carry to the stage of development candidates, plant derived small molecules with potential as new cosmetic and agrochemical agents. These compounds will derive from plants originating from major biodiversity hotspots in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific regions. The starting point of the project will be a diversity-oriented natural product library of 500 compounds, from which promising scaffolds are identified by a screening. Chemotaxonomy and chemodiversity oriented collection of plant material, the generation of a library of 3600 extracts, and a state-of-the-art technology platform for miniaturized natural product discovery will generate focused sub-libraries around these privileged scaffolds. Further evaluation of these sub-libraries will lead to the development of novel products in agrochemistry and/or cosmetics with new or improved properties over existing active ingredients.