Poster: Education

Abs # 22: Medicinal Plants of the Southwest: a student development activity in the biomedical sciences

Presenter:	O'Connell, Mary A., moconnel@nmsu.edu
Authors	O'Connell, Mary A. (A)   Rodriguez, Jaime  (A)
Affiliations:	(A): Department of Agronomy and Horticulture, New Mexico State University
Web Site:	http://medplant.nmsu.edu

Medicinal plants have played an important role throughout history in the southwest region of the United States and Northern Mexico. Working in teams, students do literature research, then design experiments to extract organs of the plants and describe the chemical composition using state of the art analytical instrumentation, primarily GC-MS. These extracts are then used in bioassays to screen for anti-microbial activities. The selection of plants to be characterized is based on the ethnobotanical literature. Over the past four years, ~100 students have participated in the summer workshops and have characterized the chemical composition of close to 20 species. The results of their efforts are published on the web site and are incorporated into a database (http://medplant.nmsu.edu/). A complete description of the program will be presented. This work was supported in part by NM AES and NIH grant GM61222. and NCI grant U56 CA96288.