Jean‐Luc Wolfender is a chemist, who completed a PhD in pharmacognosy with Prof. Kurt Hostettmann (University of Lausanne, Switzerland, 1993). After being responsible of the analytical services of this laboratory, he performed his postdoc with Prof. Al Burlingame on Conus venom profiling (UCSF, San Francisco). He is now full Professor at the Phytochemistry and Bioactive Natural Product research unit of the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences of the University of Geneva (Switzerland), where he was the president of the School and is presently vice‐ dean of the Faculty of Sciences. He has been strongly involved in the 90s in the introduction of LC‐MS and LC‐NMR for the profiling of crude plants extracts for dereplication purposes in natural product-based drug discovery research programs. He is currently developing innovative MS‐ and NMR‐ based metabolomics strategies in the frame of projects related to phytochemistry, microbial interactions and phytotherapy. He is specialized in the de novo structure identification of biomarkers at the microgram scale and is using a miniaturized approach that combines activity‐based HPLC profiling and high content information bioassays such as those involving zebrafish. His main research interests are focused on the search of novel inducible bioactive natural products in response to various biotic and abiotic stimuli as well for the study of the mode of action of phytopharmaceuticals from a systems biology perspective. He has many collaborations with South America and Asia mainly in relation with bioactivity guided isolation studies for the discovery of novel natural products of therapeutic interest and his involved in the organization of workshops for the promoting metabolomics with the natural product community.
Recent key publications:
Allard PM, Peresse T, Bisson J, Gindro K, Marcourt L, Pham VC, Roussi F, Litaudon M, Wolfender JL. 2016. Integration of Molecular Networking and In-Silico MS/MS Fragmentation for Natural Products Dereplication. Anal. Chem. 88: 3317-23.
Olivon F, Allard PM, Koval A, Righi D, Genta-Jouve G, Neyts J, Apel C, Pannecouque C, Nothias LF, Cachet X, Marcourt L, Roussi F, Katanaev VL, Touboul D, Wolfender JL, Litaudon M. 2017. Bioactive Natural Products Prioritization Using Massive Multi-informational Molecular Networks. ACS Chem Biol 12: 2644-2651
Wolfender JL, Nuzillard JM, van der Hooft JJJ, Renault JH, Bertrand S. 2019. Accelerating Metabolite Identification in Natural Product Research: Toward an Ideal Combination of Liquid Chromatography-High-Resolution Tandem Mass Spectrometry and NMR Profiling, in Silico Databases, and Chemometrics. Anal. Chem. 91: 704-742.
Wolfender JL, Litaudon M, Touboul D, Queiroz EF. 2019. Innovative omics-based approaches for prioritisation and targeted isolation of natural products – new strategies for drug discovery. Nat. Prod. Rep. 36: 855-868.