Plant extracts goals

Goals of Preparative Layer Chromatography of Plant Extracts.252... 

Despite some successes in PHA production by plants, Drs. Yves Poirier and Stevens Brumbley believe production of PHA in crops and plants remains a challenging project. The challenges for the future are to succeed in the synthesis of PHA co-polymer with a narrow range of monomer composition, at levels that do not compromise plant productivity, and to find methods for efficient and economical extraction of polymers from plants. These goals will undonbtedly require a deeper understanding of plant biochemical pathways and advances in biorefinery. 

After the foliar samples have been collected they are placed on wet ice and brought back to a facility for dislodging. The goal of the dislodging procedure is to extract the residue present on the leaf surface that is available for transfer from the leaf. Residues that have been absorbed into the plant matrix would not be available for transfer. The best practice is to dislodge the residue within 4 h of collecting the sample. 

Two different objectives are common when extracting soil to determine its metal content. The first is to determine the amount of biologically active metal present. This is typically the goal for determining the levels of plant-required metals. In terms of total samples analyzed, this is the most common reason for extracting soil. Metals in soil that are essential to plants and that are most... 

From this point on there are numerous ways of proceeding with the analysis. Crude extracts can be made from different mutant cells. The extract from one mutant can be used to complement the extract from another mutant in tryptophan synthesis, which can lead to an assay for a particular enzyme carried by one mutant that is missing in the other mutant. The goal at this juncture is to purify each enzyme of the pathway so that the properties of the enzymes and the reactions they catalyze can be individually scrutinized. All of the tryptophan enzymes have been isolated from E. coli. Studies of other systems indicate a remarkable similarity for the operation of this pathway in different microorganisms and plants. 

Palynology is the study of fossil pollen (and sometimes plant spores) extracted from lake sediment, peat bog, or other matrices. The most common goal of paly-nological research is to reconstruct the probable character of historical plant communities, inferred from the abundance of species in dated portions of the fossil pollen record. Pollen analysis is an extremely useful tool for understanding the character of ancient vegetation and its response to changes in environmental conditions, particularly in climate. Pollen analysis also has an economically important modem industrial use in the exploration for resources of fossil fnels. Palynology is also used to help reconstmct the probable habitats and foods of ancient humans and of wild animals. 

With the goal of removing as much of the phytochemical of interest from the plant raw material as quickly as possible, knowledge of the concepts of equilibrium and mass transfer is essential for economically operating extraction equipment. Extraction variables and operation are chosen to maximize the value of the equilibrium constant, K, in Equation 11.1 and the rate of extraction, 8C/5t, in Equation 11.2. These two equations show that only four factors affect extraction operation ... 

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