About Us

The Medicinal Plant Consortium (MPC) is a NIH supported project (GM092521) consists of 13 collaborating research units from 7 institutions focused on providing transcriptomic and metabolomic resources for 14 key medicinal plants to the worldwide research community for the advancement of drug production and development. This announcement pertains to the release of the metabolomes for Atropa belladonna and Digitalis purpurea. The metabolomes are derived by extracting the small organic compounds (1,000 to 2,000 different metabolites per plant) from up to 20 different tissue types/treatments for each plant species, then analyzing each extract independently by Liquid Chromatography-Time-Of-Flight Mass Spectrometry (LC-TOF MS). Individual metabolites are identified and their relative abundance measured on the basis of their molecular mass (atomic mass units) as reflected by their parent ion generated upon ionization, plus adducts with various salts (i.e. NH4+ and Na+) and, in special cases, possible oligomeric forms (i.e. twice the actual parent ion mass).