Research Prospectus

Nature is the ultimate chemist! While we are synthetic chemists at heart, meaning we make molecules, humans will never beat nature as far as molecular complexity, efficiency, and overall synthetic skill. The interest in this research sub aim stems from the PI's love of all that grows. While traditional approaches to natural product isolation have been fruitful in the discovery of many biologically active therapeutics, we and our collaborators believe that most of highly active natural products have been overlooked because they are found in such small quantities.

Using modern techniques such as cryo-microelectron diffraction, multidimensional NMR, high resolution mass spectrometry, etc. we aim to investigate the occurrence of novel molecular entities in various stigmatized plants. Stigmatized plants are plants that society has decided are taboo, such as plants that produce compounds that are currently illegal or frowned upon. Attitudes are shifting and medicinal value is being found in all sorts of plants that produce psychoactive substances and we aim to investigate these plants for novel chemical entities. We begin this investigation by looking deeply into the echinopssis (AKA Trichocereus) genus of cacti originating from South America.