We completed the full survey of Nigerian ethnomedicines for Tuberculosis. This involved re-interviewing approximately fourty traditional healers, collecting the plants indicated in their recipes, and retesting for in vitro activity both here at NIH and at NIPRD (against BCG).? We developed and identified a scoring system for ranking individual plant compoenents of traditional TB recipes, approximately two dozen plants had very high in vitro activities and were recommended multiple times by independent healers. Amongst these were three plants that have previously been reported in the scientific literature as having antiTB activity.? We recollected individual priority plants in a 1kg scale, including herbarium specimens for each (on-going in some cases since flowers need to wait until the appropriate season). These plants have been retested and the original activity recapitulates in nearly all cases.? We have developed a sequential extraction system for preliminary purification of the priority list of plants.? We have obtained microarray profiles of the transcriptional response of MTB to killing by several of the most potent extracts. The crude extracts in most cases induced too many transcriptional responses to be conclusive, however the sequential extraction methodology should be adequate to obtain extracts sufficiently pure to reveal mechanism of action.? Nnekka Ibekwe won an award for best poster at the Tuberculosis Gordon Research Conference for a poster describing the joint research project.
