Greetings!
I am an undergraduate currently conducting my thesis. I will be collecting parts of a large plant (leaves, stems, rhizome, flowers, and fruits) from a mountain and oven drying it later for analysis. So far, I have not read any literature on how I can preserve them during the travel back to the laboratory as this could affect my results. I was suggested to simply cut the required parts and store them in plastic cellophanes. Was the suggestion given to me correct or should I also store it in a cold ice box? Any suggestion and reply would be deeply appreciated. Thank you so much.
Dry preservation is better option. press the plant parts in two folds of newspaper of any paper having water absorbing properties
Based on the information in your explanatory text, you will be drying the samples when you get back to the lab, so I imagine you will be testing for non-volatile materials/compounds (carbohydrates, elements etc), not heat-sensitive ones (flavours/odours/specific proteins etc). If you can't pre-dry things in the field, you will have to keep them as fresh as possible until you can get them in the oven at the lab.
You haven't specified if your field site is a "cold" mountain or a "warm" one, but being based in the Philipines, I imagine it will be warm. If you can keep the samples as dry as possible as Rajendra Kumar Bansal suggests, that is good, as fungal infection will spread rapidly and make sample handling that much harder if they get wet and warm.
Transport the samples wrapped in clean* absorbent material inside plastic bags, in a cooler or polystyrene box. Note that plastic bags are good as long as they are keeping things dry: My experience is once the water gets into a plastic bag, it is so much harder to get it back out. If you can access "cold bricks" rather than frozen water, that will minimise water in the cold box to condensation. (They last a bit longer in the heat as well). If you have a portable (car-based) refrigerator, that would be optimal, but I'm also picturing a 6-hour hike up and down a mountain in tropical heat to access the plant, so you aren't likely to be bringing a fridge into the jungle.
*Clean in metal/element terms is not the same as sterile microbiological terms. Newspaper will be much more contaminating than absorbent towel, which may still have considerable amounts of bleach/sodium/chlorides that may affect your laboratory analysis.
Best of luck!
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