Effective and rapid dereplication is a hallmark of present-day drug discovery from natural sources. This project strove to both decrease the time and expand the structural diversity associated with dereplication methodologies. A 5?min liquid chromatographic run time employing heated electrospray ionization (HESI) was evaluated to determine whether it could be used as a faster alternative over the 10?min ESI method we reported previously. Results revealed that the 5?min method was as sensitive as the 10?min method and, obviously, was twice as fast. To facilitate dereplication, the retention times, UV absorption maxima, full-scan HRMS and MS/MS were cross-referenced with an in-house database of over 300 fungal secondary metabolites. However, this strategy was dependent upon the makeup of the screening in-house database. Thus, mass defect filtering (MDF) was explored as an additional targeted screening strategy to permit identification of structurally related components. The use of a dereplication platform incorporating the 5?min chromatographic method together with MDF facilitated rapid and effective identification of known compounds and detection of structurally related analogs in extracts of fungal cultures
