October 30, 2017
By: Whitney Tarpy
OXFORD, Miss. – The University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy and the National Center for Natural Products Research held its first course within the Natural Products Training Lab from Sep. 19-21, which covered various aspects and techniques of botanical authentication.
Participants from academia and industry attend the first NPTL course.
“I am very pleased with how the first training lab course went,” said Ikhlas Khan, NCNPR director. “This will be a great resource moving forward, and I’m looking forward to many more courses in the future.”
Over the three days, participants from industry and academia within and outside of the university learned the basic techniques for analyzing natural products using instruments that perform chromatography, microscopy and taxonomy. The course also offered solutions to problems related to authentication and quality issues in real workplaces, while providing practical tools that participants can apply to their own analytical processes.
“The program is definitely an eye opener for me,” said Pei Cee Lim, a visiting scholar at UM. “It showed the importance that different expertise is needed to work together. Knowledge from each fields were exposed and learned.”
The training center includes five laboratories, occupying 3,000 square feet, that can be used to teach best practices in natural products and botanical dietary supplements. A collaboration between Ole Miss researchers and Waters Corporation, Waters provided several cutting-edge analytical systems and software as part of establishing the laboratory. These include three liquid chromatography/mass spectrometer systems, as well as an accelerated supercritical fluid extraction system, each designed for various applications.
“It’s organized very well,” said Aihua Liu of Genysis Labs. “Trainers are very knowledgeable, patient and teach very well too.”
The next course is scheduled for Feb. 12-16, 2018, and registration is available at pharmacy.olemiss.edu/nptl. Both three and five-day courses will be offered.