Natural Products Chemistry Ongoing Research Activities
Chemistry of Cape Flora
Green chemistry is developed to monitor and solve problems related to environment and health. Accordingly, new strategies and active scientific research are taking place to deliver new innovative solutions for current problems. South Africa contains one of the most important and diverse flora in the world. Knowledge abstracted from South African traditional medicine represents one of the most important source for development of new medicine and or treatment for grave diseases like HIV and AIDS. Our research group dedicated to unlock the potential of the Cape Flora and to discover new active agents as new scaffolds for development of new safe and potent drugs. Also, the research group activities cover the discovery of new raw materials for application as natural cosmetic agents from Cape Flora.
Green Nanotechnology
Green Nanotechnology is a solid part of green economy and its innovations have been implemented in many industrial sectors aiming at increasing the efficiency, by reducing the waste or minimizing the consumption of raw materials and/or final products. Metal nanoparticles (NPs), because of their unique physical/chemical properties, have received a considerable attention in recent years. The efficient architectural design of metal nanoparticles for biomedical application require not only uniform size and shape but also communicating biofunctional groups that have the ability to stabilize, activate and effective targeting in the biological system. Such design need an active metal surface that can bind to the active payload in a way that reaches the end target of the NPs function. Our research group main target is to use pure natural products to synthesize and design a new generation of gold (Au) NPs “we’ call it UNI-CAP gold nanoparticles that can avoid the short coming of the current AuNPs as well as the conventional therapeutic agents.
