XVI International Botanical Congess

NYBG and Pfizer have a long-term collaborative research project surveying the biodiversity of United States and US territory plants for novel compounds of therapeutic value. The plants collected are screened for potential applicability to human biomedical, veterinary and agricultural applications. The project attempts to survey as wide a taxonomic representation as possible, to date 64% of the families of the world and 95% of the native and naturalized families of the US have been collected by 26 botanists. Both random, taxonomic, and chemosystematic criteria were used for the selection of plant samples. The herbarium vouchers are deposited in various national herbaria, aiding in the continuing efforts to inventory regional floras and describe species distributions in the US.