Honors Theses
Date of Award
2014
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
Pharmaceutics and Drug Delivery
First Advisor
Melissa Jacob
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
The prevalence of opportunistic fungal infections in hospital settings are at alarming rates. Through technological advances in natural product research, plants have become a useful source for antifungal drug discovery. More samples can be screened at once, fractionated in less time, and biologically tested at smaller quantities. However, isolating antifungal compounds from these plant extracts and determining their specific chemical makeup can still take up a significant amount of time. Therefore, this thesis presents a prioritization technique to prevent the need to isolate every compound within an active fraction. With the guidance of literature research on the genus and species of each plant sample coupled with the biological activity data collected on each sample, plant extracts can be prioritized for isolation efforts or thrown out completely if found uninteresting. This method of prioritization also fuels dereplication efforts by preventing researchers from spending time and resources on plants that have already been worked on. Plants that have had little work done on them and that have highly active fractions will lead to the discovery of novel antifungal drugs.
Recommended Citation
Fowler, Kara, "Dereplication and Prioritization of Natural Product Extracts for Antifungal Drug Discovery" (2014). Honors Theses. 501.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/501
Accessibility Status
Searchable text