• Secondary metabolites
• plants
• NMR
• MS

The title of my PhD thesis is “Secondary metabolites from plants of Mediterranean Region and Asian countries: Isolation, characterization and biological activity”
I performed my research at the “Dipartimento di Chimica Bioorganica e Biofarmacia” now “Dipartimento di Scienze Farmaceutiche” of the University of Pisa, working with the phytochemical group under the supervision of Prof. Alessandra Braca. Among all the projects in this research laboratory, there is the investigation of plants growing in the developing countries of South America, Africa, Middle East and Asia.
The aim of my research were:
To discover biologically active plants for the development of new medicines useful in the medical field, checking their use as natural remedies in the traditional medicine
To isolate either new or known secondary metabolites, verifying their biological activity also on the basis of structural relationship with drugs already used in therapy
To verify the possibility to isolate secondary metabolites biologically active from renewable parts of the plants rather than not renewable

In this framework I studied six plants: Gypsophila arabica Barkoudah (Caryophyllaceae), Opuntia ficus-indica (L.) Miller (Cactaceae), Tabebuia argentea Britt. (Bignoniaceae), Ruprechtia polystachya Griseb. (Polygonaceae), Merremia bimbim (Gagnep) van Ooststr. (Convolvulaceae), and Adenosma caeruleum R. Brown (Scrophulariaceae).
All these species were selected principally considering their use in traditional medicine. Four of six plants are of the Mediterranean region: in particular: G. arabica grows in Jordan; O. ficus-indica is a typical Mediterranean species used as diuretic remedy; T. argentea and R. polystachya were selected in the framework of a research project between our laboratory and El Zoharia Research Garden of Cairo in Egypt.
The last two plants (A. caeruleum and M. bimbim) grow in Vietnam and were selected for their use in the Vietnamese folk medicine. Furthermore, our laboratory had a research project with the Institute of Natural Products Chemistry, Vietnamese Academy of Science and Technology in Hanoi.
The work on all plants deals principally with the isolation and structural characterization of secondary metabolites by using different chromatographic separation technique, NMR spectroscopy, and mass spectrometry.
In collaboration with the Università di Salerno and the Universidad Central de Venezuela the isolated compounds were tested how possible inhibitors of Hsp90 protein and as inhibitors of Glucose-6-Phosphatase.