Ongoing Projects

Summary:

Nature represents an extraordinary reservoir of novel chemodiverse molecules and there is currently a resurgence of interest in natural products as a possible source of new lead compounds. There are a number of widely used drugs which are derived from natural sources which can be available in the form of dietary supplements, nutraceuticals, and complementary and alternative medicine. In fact, some widely used drugs against certain life-threatening diseases are derived from natural sources. The use of herbal phytopharmaceuticals to treat diseases also has been increased significantly. Although Cyprus is very privileged from the floristic point of view as it exhibits great biodiversity in its flora, there is not a systematic attempt to exploit native flora to discovery new bioactive molecules for pharmaceutical industry. Thus, the proposed project will establish a broad transdisciplinary framework, focusing on the development and establishment strategies to discovery new antimicrobial and antidiabetic compounds of plant origin. The main objectives of the project are (i) to screen for the antimicrobial and antidiabetic properties of native plants, (ii) to discovery new antimicrobial and antidiabetic molecules with the employment of dual high-resolution inhibition profiling techniques, (iii) to identify the structures of active molecules and to quantify using advanced techniques such as Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and Mass Spectrometry (MS), and (iv) to further study the antidiabetic and antimicrobial potency of pure compounds through biophysical and in silico techniques. The implementation of this project is expected to produce the following results: (i) the development of state-of-the-art techniques for screening of unexplored Cypriot flora for bioactive molecules, (ii) a knowledge base for the antimicrobial and antidiabetic properties of native plants, and (iii) a library of pure compounds and/or fraction with antimicrobial and/or antidiabetic activities.