Location: Natural Products Utilization Research
Project Number: 6060-30600-001-000-D
Project Type: In-House Appropriated
Start Date: Nov 24, 2025
End Date: Nov 23, 2030
Objective:
Objective 1: Enhance economically important health promoting and bioactive phytochemicals by determination of optimal plant growth and post-harvest processing conditions for medicinal, aromatic, and specialty crops.
Objective 2: Discover natural product-based biofungicides and bioherbicides that enhance yield, quality and marketability of specialty and high value crops.
Approach:
Natural products from these botanicals and other sources remain a huge repository of untapped compounds with fungicidal and herbicidal activities. The long-term objective of this project is to identify, chemically characterize, and develop new biochemical biopesticides (fungicides and herbicides) from natural sources and improve product quality through phytochemical optimization of specialty, medicinal, and aromatic crops. Within this project, we have two major objectives.
Objective 1 seeks to enhance economically important health promoting and bioactive phytochemicals using a variety of approaches to include both plant growth and post-harvest optimizations. The approach for plant growth optimizations involves contributions from collaborators for multi-site/multi-plant variety studies while analytical chemical compositional analysis will be performed using LC-MS, LC/Q-ToF, GC-MS, GC/Q-ToF, and NMR approaches. Methods will be developed and validated as needed when analytical and extraction methods are not available. Post-harvest optimization will involve enhancement of desirable phytochemical compositions and yields using a variety of techniques involving liquid/liquid partitioning and solid/liquid chromatographic methods.
Objective 2 will follow a screening-based approach sourced from plant and microbial extracts using a variety of approaches and methods. Briefly, extracts within the National Center for Natural Products Research in-house repository and elsewhere as well as microbes and plants will be screened for the discovery of natural product based biofungicides and bioherbicides. Progression from bioactive crude extract to pure natural compounds will follow a bioassay-directed fractionation approach enabling the discovery of specific natural compounds responsible for biological activity.