Innovating Natural Products Analysis: Sustainability as the Past, Present, and Future Cornerstone

Plants and natural products are an extraordinary renewable resource, characterized by a wide range of compounds with physicochemical properties that make them valuable across various fields, from their use as bioactive compounds to their application as raw materials. However, fully and sustainably harnessing this potential requires comprehensive and precise analytical characterization. Sustainability has always been the research cornerstone in this field, guiding the development of innovative analytical methods. This implies the pursuit of approaches to improve the accurate characterization (both chiral and non-chiral) of natural products and the development of extraction techniques that incorporate the use of natural compounds, optimizing resources and reducing environmental impact. This lecture illustrates how the concept of sustainability - intended not only in environmental terms but also as sustainability of results and laboratory productivity - has inspired the most and less recent innovations in natural product analysis and will discuss how the developed approaches can be used as a guide to ensure that sustainability continues to be the guiding principle for future innovation.