"Just as the sensory properties of plants interact with and trigger your sense of smell, plants' natural compounds can target and cause a reaction within your body. This gives them tremendous pharmaceutical potential," said Chappell.
During this two-year project researchers set out to develop a collection of data that would aid in understanding how plants make chemicals, a process called biosynthesis. This knowledge ultimately could make it possible to engineer plants to produce larger quantities of medicinally useful compounds as well as different versions with other therapeutic potential.
To develop the resources, the researchers studied the genes and chemical profiles of 14 plants known for medicinal properties or compounds with biological activity. These included plants such as foxglove, ginseng, and periwinkle. The findings will help researchers discover how nature's chemical diversity is created and enable them to uncover new drug candidates or increase the efficacy of existing ones.
"The current understanding of molecules and genes involved in the formation of beneficial compounds is very incomplete," said O'Connor, who is also a lecturer in chemical sciences at University of East Anglia.
"However, the ability to conduct genome-wide studies of model plant species has resulted in an explosive increase in our knowledge of and capacity to understand how genes control biological processes and chemical composition".
The MPC project includes participants from the University of Kentucky, Michigan State University, Iowa State University, the University of Mississippi, Purdue University, Texas A&M University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the John Innes Centre in Norwich. The researchers represent a broad spectrum of expertise from plant biology and systematics to analytical chemistry, genetics and molecular biology, and drug development from natu
|Contact: Zoe Dunford|
Norwich BioScience Institutes