Project Description
Natural products are fecund source of medicine since antiquity. Nature has selected plants as catalytic tool for healing. They stay vital to modern life as antibiotics, anti-cancer drugs, cardiac drugs, antifungal etc. The major achievements in the field of natural-products research of the past decades had clearly demonstrated that natural products represent an unparalleled and unquestionable source of molecular diversity for drug discovery and development, especially when many plant species are diminishing. Natural product holds firm position in medicinal industry so recent focus of pharmaceutical industry is to develop medicine based on isolation from plants. Pakistan is bestowed upon with wide variety of medicinal plants having enormous therapeutic activity. The research aim is to focus on plants that were used as folk medicines whose many varieties are still untouched and unswayed. In the future, the synergy of natural-products research and biotechnology will drive new plant-drug development. The genus Polygonum & Fragaria are selected for the phyto-chemical investigation due to their immense therapeutic activity. The selected species for the investigation are Polygonum barbatum & Fragaria nubicola, Fragaria vesca. However the work may be extended to other plants. Plants will be collected and extracted, these extracts after concentration (on rotavap) will be subjected to chromatographic techniques. The isolated compounds will be identifying through different spectroscopic techniques (UV, IR, Mass, NMR). After that these pure compounds will be studied for biological assay. Natural products will be derivatized to see the effects of structural variations on the biological activities.
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