PHARMACOGNOSY
PHARMACOGNOSY
Welcome to the Department of PHARMACOGNOSY
Objectives
The universal role of biologically based pharmaceuticals in the treatment of disease is illustrated by their use in all major medical systems. Pharmacognosy is a specific discipline that deals with rapid development in knowledge and use in human and vertenary purposes of biological medicinal substances (plants, microorganisms and animal products). This topic gives information about the principles and procedures used to identify, authenticate, extract, isolate active ingredients by chromatography, purify and develop herbal formulations and testing processes for isolated components.
An Insight into Activities
The students and the departmental faculty conduct organized research to isolate and estimate different active components from herbal medicines. The department provides UG students with a quality training to develop practices for morphological and microscopic identification of the drug.
The different fields within today's pharmacognosy include:-
- Medical Ethnobotany:study of the traditional use of plants in the society.
- Ethnopharmacology:study of the bio-pharmacological evalution of traditionally used natural drugs.
- Phytotherapy:study of effect of extracts from medicinal plants.
- Phytochemistry or natural product chemistry:a field closely related to organic chemistry, studying the chemical composition of living organisms.
Plants as the major source of the natural products have played vital roles in providing both food and drug materials. The aim and objective of the courses given by the department is to acquaint the students with the basic knowledge of the natural products. Students engaged in pharmacy and in other health professionals should know the role of natural products in discovery of drugs and their use and application in eradicating ailments. The students are given sufficient knowledge to be able to describe morphology and histology of different plant organs and identify drugs in the whole state and in powdered condition with suitable examples of medicinal plants. The students are reinforce the knowledge of study of plant constituents and its isolation, identification, qualitative and quantitative evaluation, medicinal use and scale up process
