ENVS 3040 Study Guide - Final Guide: Ethnobotany, Drug Discovery, Ecosystem Diversity

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Environmental Sciences
• Course: ENVS 3040
• Professor: Simone Haerri

Document Summary

Unit 4: from forest to pharmacy: discuss the need for conservation of healing knowledge, natural ecosystems, and biodiversity, discuss and assess the success and limitations of methods used preserve healing knowledge, ecosystems, and biodiversity. There are 4 main approaches to collecting plants for new drug discoveries: 1: random, samples of vegetation are gathered randomly in an area of rich biological diversity. 2: advantages = highest probability of identifying possible drugs, because the selection of plants is based on a known history of the use of these plants for therapeutic purposes by one or more societies. This knowledge provides insights into potential uses for the plant compounds prior to conducting standard medical screening tests: disadvantages = very time-consuming and expensive process to collect and interpret ethnobotanical data and information. Ethnobotany as a pharmacological research tool and recent developments in cns- active natural products from ethnobotanical sources (mcclatchey et al. , 2009)