Originally posted by hypervalentiodine
Plant scientists don't tend to have much to do with drug discovery or the isolation and structural elucidation of natural products. That's where we chemists come into it.

It is similar here in the UK, but there seems to be a growth now towards a biological arm, especially at the molecular level, that is facilitating the Chemistry side of things and the development of synthetic medicinal replacements, but with the ever increasing demand for biomass material, it appears to be more of a diversification, rather than a driven emphasis. For example, research into the medicinal properties of hemp are being enabled because funding is available in order to explore it's long term efficiency as a biomass provider for fuel production. The biologists are mapping the traditional product, or raw plant material, identifiying the active compounds, data which is then being fed into Big Pharma research and development.

The university system in the UK is far more reliant on independent funding at the research level, often from the private and corporate sector, many universities have had to develop extensive corporate relations in order to develop an international standard in research. Our blue skies research is sadly, almost 0. At the University of York where I work, a large proportion of our project funding is from overseas, in my department, most of our funding is from the US, both the private and public sectors. We are even growing plants on behalf of the US military. As much of the plant breeding work that is going on is being monitored at the molecular level, and more and more plants are being genetically mapped, we are identifying the processes involved in the natural synthesis of active compounds. Chemists and plant biologists, I predict, will be working increasingly along parallel lines as we move on into the future.