Developments in small molecule chemotaxonomy over the past 35 years

73 Developments in small molecule chemotaxonomy over the past 35 years 

One advantage that secondary metabolites should have is that, when biosynthetic pathways are known, it is possible to identify events that have evolutionary implications. It has always been attractive, therefore, fo consider the use of numerical mefhods in assessing the implications of chemical profiles. An early example of fhis was an analysis of the flavonoids of Geranium by Bate-Smith (1973), in which flavonoid scores were produced for each species based on the presence or absence of individual flavonoids. These scores were used to identify the relative advancement of individual species. 

Life for fhe chemical faxonomisf became more complicated as it emerged that the distribution map for almost every structural type of compound was 

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