CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

DNA Polymerases and Topoisomerases act in nucleic acids metabolism by modulating different processes like replication, mitosis, damage repair, DNA topology and transcription. It has been widely documented that DNA Polymerases serve as molecular targets for antiviral and antitumoral chemotherapy. Furthermore, Telomerase is a ribonucleoprotein with exacerbated activity in most tumor cell lines, becoming an emerging target in Cancer treatment. Many natural products that are widely distributed throughout the plant kingdom have attraction due to their bioactive properties, such as tumor growing inhibitory effects, and anti-AIDS activity. In view of their importance as drugs and biologically active natural products, and their medicinally useful benefits, extensive studies have been carried out on the characterization of new compounds in recent years. This work tries to summarize the investigation about natural and semi-synthetic products of natural origin with the ability to inhibit key enzymes that play a crucial role in DNA metabolism. These processes may include recombination, replication, transcription and chromosome segregation during cell division and their possible application as antitumoral and antiviral agents.