Khalsa College Amritsar in Collaboration with IIT Bombay Organized Two Days Workshop on topic: Natural Medicine and its Scope in Biomedical Sector

The P.G. Department of Botany, Khalsa College Amritsar in collaboration with IIT-Bombay organized two days National Workshop on "Natural Medicine and its scope in Biomedical Sector". Mr. Peeyush Parshad, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, Delhi NCR India was resource person of the workshop. Dr. Mehal Singh, Principal, Khalsa College, Amritsar welcomed the speaker and highlighted the importance of medicinal plants in our daily life. Mr. Peeyush Parshad started the workshop by introducing a relationship between the habitat of medicinal plants and their use for particular disorders. The plants growing in stones e.g Bryophyllum commonly known as pattharchat is used as a medicine to dissolve stones in human body. The healing properties of medicinal plants are because of the phytochemicals present within them which could be isolated and explored in drug discovery. He also put emphasis that plants can only act as medicine when taken in a proper dose which is calculated as dose/kg of body weight. He discussed the methods to calculate the dose/kg/day by using various animal models. The first day of workshop continued with the presentation on 'working of state-of-art technologies' and how these are being in use for the exploration, isolation and testing of a medicinal plant to report its phytochemicals as a safe drug or food supplement. These technologies provides in-depth results that how photochemical is metabolizing within the body and depending upon the positive results the medicinal plants are regarded as safe drug for human consumption. The second day of the workshop started with Hands-on-Tranning of Insilco analysis where students learned the use of online mapping tools to find the possible targets of action of a natural compound. The conference proceeded with the interactive session where speaker answered the questions raised by the students and also told them the 'impressive CV' writing, 'scientific writing' and how to explore jobs in the related field. A test was conducted after the session and four students were selected for the next round under the scheme 'Wet Lab Championship' which is going to held at IIT-BOMBAY. Prof. Kirandeep Kaur Hundal, Head and Programme director, encouraged the student to learns these techniques and explore the job opportunities in the respective field.  Dr. Rajbir Singh, Organizing Secretary thanked the College authority for providing infrastructural facilities, WLC IIT Bombay, faculty members and participants for their corporation to make workshop a successful event. Dr. Madhu, Dr. Prabhjit Kaur, Dr. Harpreet Kaur and Dr. Sushant Sharma, were present and assisted for the hands-on-tranning during the workshop.