A long standing interest of the lab has been the study of flavonoids. More recently, we have started to investigate those flavonoids that accumulate on plant surfaces, known as “surface, exudate, or external flavonoids”. We are interested in understanding the distribution pattern of surface flavonoids in the plant kingdom. We have started investing the occurrence of surface flavonoids in the grasses.
We want to know whether the accumulation of surface flavonoids is a characteristic of a plant family or genus, or whether it is a curiosity of a few species within a genus.
We would want to understand whether plants that accumulate surface flavonoids have any advantages over those that do not. Some hypotheses suggest that surface flavonoids may be an adaptive feature for the plant’s survival within the environment. Therefore, we would want to know whether the surface flavonoids are of any ecological significance to the plants, especially if they play a role in the primary defense of the plant against insects and pathogens, as well as having allelopathic effects against competing weeds.
We are also interested on the potential medicinal applications of surface flavonoids. Being lipophilic, surface flavonoids have greater capacity to move across body tissuess than the hydrophilic vacuolar flavonoids. We are curious as to whether surface flavonoids could be used in the treatment of various human conditions such as cancer, and bacterial or viral infections.
back to projects summary
