I had the opportunity to present the most recent results of my research work, supervised by Dr. Pastrana, at the BioMinds Research Day Poster Session.
During this activity, I visited three posters and interviewed those students involved in each respective project. Among these projects was that of M. A Ortiz, who studied the flavonoid content of medicinal plant extracts from several genus. Apparently, in several regions of Puerto Rico, islanders have popularized the use of some plants used as teas for their ‘’supposedly’’ high levels of antioxidants. Ortiz was interested in quantifying the antioxidant content of these medicinal plants, in particular their flavonoid content, to determine whether or not these plants could in fact provide the benefits many people allege. Although some of the results were somewhat misleading, suggesting some of the tested plants contained more flavonoid than their overall antioxidant content, Ortiz pointed out that some of the plants they tested were complicating the quantification process and, consequently, more studies were necessary to obtain more trustworthy results.
Another poster I visited was that of T.K. Jessica, who studied the isolation and characterization of organic compounds from M. charantia. This plant is used in several regions of Puerto Rico for the treatment of Diabetes Type II. She was trying to isolate these compounds using size exclusion columns, and characterizing them using 1-D nuclear magnetic resonance. Relatively high concentrations of these compounds were needed in order to characterize them. Consequently, Jessica was using a mathematical approach to quantify the amount of sample she was able to recover using different solvents. Unfortunately, some of her calculations were not able to explain or predict all endeavors of sample recovery, predicting significant yields of sample when, in fact, low yields were recovered. By looking at the structure of analogous organic compounds to that which she’s interested in isolating, I noticed these are mainly ring structures that might potentially serve as chromophores. I suggested she could look more into this and try to use a different, more reliable analytical approach such as absorbance measurements of her sample.
Finally, I visited the poster of A. Lopez-Cruz, w ho worked under the supervision of Dr. C. Rinaldi from the ChemE department at UPRM. He worked on the preparation of magnetic nanoparticles for their use in biomedical applications such as cancer treatment. These nanoparticles contained covalently bound Chitosan, and were characterized using several approaches. I happened to be familiar with FT-IR, DLS and SEM data analysis, which were among the instruments he used to confirm the validity of his results. I’ve mostly used this sort of instrumentation for biophysic/structural biology purposes, so it was interesting to see how other applications also benefit from this technology. I was mostly excited with this work for, although it is far from related to most of the work I perform, it was still the most related out of all three projects I came across with.
