PROJECT SUMMARY_BOTANICAL CORE Many botanicals are touted to have beneficial effects on cognition, mood, sleep quality and other functions that are diminished during aging. An abiding challenge with scientific studies involving botanicals is the complexity and variability of their chemical profile as well as ambiguities in the identity and species homogeneity of botanical preparations. The proposed Botanical Dietary Supplement Research Center (BDSRC) will perform studies critical to future clinical trials of “Botanicals enhancing neurological and functional resilience in aging”. Based on public/health/relevance, public interest and exciting preliminary data this BDSRC will focus on developing and evaluating Centella asiatica (CA; “gotu kola”) and Withania somnifera (WS; “ashwagandha”) as botanical dietary supplements that show high promise to promote neurological and functional resilience in an aging population. The Botanical Core (B-Core) will support the research projects of the BDSRC by (1) providing authenticated and well characterized CA and WS derived materials for use in the BDSRC’s research as well as by any CARBON collaborations, will source plant material, authenticate and document its macro-, scopic and chemical characteristics, and produce, characterize and provide derivatives (extracts, fractions and compounds) of CA and WS to the BDSRCs research project and CARBON collaborators. The B-Core will develop, advance and apply analytical methods based on liquid chromatography (LC) coupled to mass spectrometry (MS) for the quantification of active compounds in CA and WS both in plant materials and in biological samples (plasma, brain) derived from animals treated with the botanicals. (3) The B-core will provide high content fingerprints of botanical extracts based on high resolution mass spectrometry-enabled metabolomics techniques. And, (4) the B-Core together with biostatistics support (provided by the A-Core) will conduct chemometric correlation approaches to identify active compounds, where preparations of CA and WS are fingerprinted by LC-HRMS and evaluated in a series of bioassays conducted under Project 2. In addition, the B-Core will participate in a cross-component effort to discover unknown biological effects of CA botanicals by evaluating gene expression and/or metabolomics data from primary neurons (Project 2) and brains of animals (Project 1) treated with CA or derivatives, and attempt integration of the “omics’ findings under the guidance of a Bioinformatician (A-Core). The work of the B-Core will therefore be essential to, and synergistic with, activities of the other components of this BDSRC and with other CARBON collaborators.