MISSISSIPPI COBRE: P4: ID OF REWARDING CONSTITUENTS IN BOTANICAL EXTRACTS

这个子项目是众多研究子项目之一

This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. The overarching goal of this project is to develop a standardized protocol using a traditional in vivo bioassay to facilitate the screening of chemically complex botanical products with the goal of efficiently identifying plant constituents that possess rewarding or aversive properties that may ultimately limit their use as therapeutic agents. This project will utilize the expertise of natural product scientists at the National Center for Natural Products Research in providing the needed plant extracts and fractions for screening. The first aim is to use the conditioned place preference/avoidance (CPP/CPA) paradigm as an in vivo bioassay to screen botanical extracts, fractions and constituents and/or semisynthetic single entity compounds for putative reinforcing or aversive properties. The second aim is to incorporate and validate the use of multiple regression/correlation (MRC) design and analysis to pinpoint "activity" in a plant extract or fraction without the need to screen every single isolated constituent. In this statistical design, the CPP/CPA score serves as the predictor variable and varying constituent levels in a series of plant extracts as the criterion variable. The resulting analyses will predict which constituent or constituents are responsible for the rewarding/aversive properties within a plant. It is hoped that such an MRC design and analysis screening protocol generalizes to other in vivo screening assays (e.g., anxiety, depression, analgesia) in their search for putative therapeutic constituents contained in botanical products.