Prairie to Pharmacy Research Program: Investigation of Prairie Plants for Chemicals that Inhibit Vital Cellular Pathways
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The prairie ecological zone harbours plants that flourish under the selective pressures of a short growing season and large grazing herbivores. These features induce plants to produce secondary metabolites that are toxic to mammals. Evidence from agricultural sources supports the hypothesis that these plants contain chemicals that will be toxic to human cells. We have prepared a unique extract library from prairie plants representing 18 taxonomical families. The majority of extracts in the library are toxic to cancer cells at concentrations ranging from 15 to 150µg/mL. A key component of our research is to use cell-based phenotypic assays to investigate precisely how the extracts or chemicals affect cells. We have identified an anti-mitotic activity in extracts from 5 species of the taxonomical family Asteraceae. Extracts PP-006 and PP-360 induced mitotic cell rounding characterized by high Cdk1 enzyme activity, a metaphase arrangement of chromosomes, followed by a striking distortion of the mitotic spindle and damaged chromosomes. By biology-guided fractionation of extracts, we isolated the natural product Pulchelloid A and four other sesquiterpenes that have anti-mitotic activity. Of the 3000 described sesquiterpenes, only 6 have a mitotic arrest activity. With extract PP-630 from the family Caprifoliaceae, we have observed an unusual cellular phenomenon in which treated cells acquire a large perinuclear vacuole. To date, the perinuclear region of cells is poorly described in structure and components. Finally, we have identified a pro-apoptotic activity from a flavone isolated from the Buffalo bean (Fabaceae). Our analysis indicates that prairie plants are a rich source of chemicals for use as tools to investigate cell function, and potential cancer treatments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".