BENFRA Supporting Cores
The BENFRA Center is supported by two Cores, a Botanical Research Core and an Administrative Core, which are critical to the success of the Center’s research mission.
- Botanical Core
- Administrative Core
Botanical Core
Botanical Research Core
The Botanical Research Core will be based at Oregon State University, with collaborating laboratories at OHSU, University of Mississippi's National Center for Natural Product Research (NCNPR) and Oregon's Wild Harvest (OWH). It will support the research projects of the BDSRC by:
- Providing authenticated and well-characterized Centella asiatica (CA) and Withania somnifera (WS) plant material for use in the BDSRC’s research as well as by any CARBON collaborations, sourcing plant material, authenticating and documenting their chemical and genetic characteristics. Plant materials will be cultivated at, or sourced through, OWH. Chemical characterization will take place at OHSU and OWH and DNA fingerprinting and barcoding will take place at the NCNPR.
- Producing and characterizing authenticated and/or characterized derivatives (extracts, fractions and compounds) of CA and WS for use by the BDSRC’s research projects or by CARBON collaborators.
- Providing high-content fingerprints of botanical extracts based on high resolution mass spectrometry-enabled metabolomics techniques.
- Developing, advancing, and applying analytical methods based on liquid chromatography (LC) coupled to mass spectrometry (MS) for the quantification of compounds in CA and WS both in plant materials and in biological samples (plasma, brain) derived from animals treated with the botanicals.
- Conducting bio-chemometric correlation approaches with biostatistics support to identify active compounds, wherein preparations of CA and WS are fingerprinted by LC-HRMS and evaluated in a series of bioassays conducted under Project 2.
In addition, the Botanical Research Core will participate in a cross-component effort to discover unknown biological effects of CA by evaluating gene expression and/or metabolomics data from primary neurons (Project 2) and brains of animals (Project 1) treated with CA or derivatives, and attempting to integrate the “omics’ findings under the guidance of a bioinformatician (Administrative Core).