Research Interests:

Our research interests lie in several areas.

One area is directed at the development of tropical fruit varieties that are better suited to growing in south GA.  A major emphasis of this project is directed at the development of new varieties of banana (both dessert and cooking bananas) better suited for production in south GA. In addition to the work with edible bananas, I have also been involved in research directed at the production of new ornamental bananas for use in landscape applications. In these projects both traditional breeding and mutation breeding work is being carried out, including a variety of other biotechnology techniques.

We are also interested in the production of biologically active molecules using plant material grown under tissue culture conditions.  This approach to the production of biologically active molecules offers a number of advantages over the traditional approach to the isolation of biologically active molecules from plants.  One advantage is that it is possible to control the environmental conditions under which the plant material is grown in the laboratory.  This is not an option when the plant is grown outdoors.  Another advantage is that a number of plants actually eliminate these biologically active molecules into the growth media that the plantlet is growing upon.  This means that isolation of the desired compounds can be accomplished much more easily than is the case when the plant is grown in soil (sacrificing the plant and separation of the desired compounds from the rest of the plant biomass).  Another attractive feature associated with the tissue culture approach is that the same plantlet can be used to harvest multiple batches of secondary metabolites by simply changing the growth medium. This means the plantlet is not destroyed but simply transferred to a new jar of growth media and allowed to produce more of the desired compound. 

Another area involves the use of vinylboronic esters as dipolarophiles in 1,3-dipolar cycloadditions. We have carried out a number of reactions between vinylboronic esters and a variety of 1,3-dipoles and the results of some of these studies have been published. One area which has been extremely rich in new chemistry is the reaction of vinylboronic esters with nitrile oxides. These reactions lead to boronic ester substituted delta-2-isoxazolines. When the synthetic utility of the delta-2-isoxazoline is coupled with that of the boronic ester a very versatile building block for natural product synthesis is obtained. We have also employed 1,2-disubstituted vinylboronic esters in nitrile oxide cycloadditions and this methodology has led to a very efficient synthesis of 4-hydroxy- delta-2-isoxazolines. This methodology has been modified to allow the production of optically active 4-hydroxy- delta-2-isoxazolines. We have also explored the reaction of vinylboronic esters with other 1,3-dipoles and these reactions also lead to useful cycloadducts.