Ever wonder how chemists isolate natural products in plants that wind up leading to modern wonder drugs?
Relevant to medicine, natural products have provided a continual source of innovation for drug development through the discovery of new “druggable” cellular pathways and the advancement of new lead compounds. This class of small molecules is extremely important to human health with approximately 50% of all drugs having some origin in natural products. In the field of anticancer agents the number is closer to 60% and in infectious diseases 75% of clinical agents are natural products or natural product based. Recently, there has been a revival of natural product studies, with many companies returning to screening natural products for the discovery of new drug candidates.
Extraction is the first crucial step in the analysis of medicinal plants. Students will learn extraction techniques such as Thin-layer chromatography (TLC) in order to differentiate between many different components in a mixture. Students will then view the TLC plate under a UV light which can be used for confirmation of purity.
Endophytes, typically fungi or streptomycetes, are a rich untapped resource for natural product discovery. These microorganisms are found in the internal tissues of plants. Each of the approximately 300,000 plant species on earth each contains one or more of these microbes. Within the plants endophytes play either a neutral or beneficial role in the growth and survival. As a result of their symbiotic relationships with their hosts they have been largely studied in the context of fortifying agriculturally important plant species. More recently endophytes have been shown to produce a bewildering number of interesting and important small molecules such as the first billion-dollar anticancer agent known as taxol, which is pictured above.
