Saussurea medusa Maxim. is a valuable traditional Chinese herb. The flavonoids are the main active pharmaceutical compounds in this medicinal plant species and have effective anti-tumor and anti-inflammation properties. This species is now almost extinct in China because of over-e ...
Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) is known as an economically important forest tree with a wide distribution throughout the Northern hemisphere. Recently, the species has also become recognized as a novel source of functional food and bioactive compounds with medicinal properties. The p ...
Rauwolfia serpentina holds an important position in the pharmaceutical world because of its immense anti-hypertensive properties resulting from the presence of reserpine in the oleoresin fraction of the roots. Poor seed viability, low seed germination rate, and enormous genetic v ...
Echinacace purpurea (purple cone flower) is an important medicinal plant, and widely used for phytochemical purposes. The roots are traditionally used in herbal medicines and dietary supplements as an immunostimulant in treating inflammatory and viral diseases. Extensive rese ...
Penthorum chinensePursh is a traditional medicinal herb in China. Micropropagation protocol of this plant has been established. The shoot induction rate is high by culturing nodal explants on Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium supplemented with 6-benzyladenine (BA) as compared with ki ...
Asparagus racemosus Willd., an important medicinal plant of tropical and subtropical India, is a potent phytoestrogen which is used extensively in the treatment of menopausal symptoms, diarrhea, dyspepsia, and neurodegenerative disorders. The multiple uses of this species have i ...
We developed reproducible protocols for micropropagation, callus culture, and root culture of the medicinal plant Phyllanthus urinaria, P. niruri, P. tenellus, P. corcovadensis, P. caroliniensis, P. stipulatus, and P. fraternus by using single node explants. Genotype-linked diffe ...
The study of medicinal plants has many unique challenges and special considerations. These plants are studied for their specific chemistry, or pharmacologic activity. Plants are highly sensitive to their environment and respond through changes in their chemistry. To date, one of the bi ...
We have developed a rapid in vitro propagation system, via axillary shoot formation from nodal explants of Swertia chirata Buch Ham. Culture medium supplemented with 2mg/L. BAP is best for direct shoot regeneration initially formed adventitious buds from axils of the nodal explants after 30 ...
Vanilla (Vanilla planifolia Andrews (syn. V. fragrans Salisb.), a source of natural vanillin, plays a major positive role in the economy of several countries. A native to the Central America, its primary gene pool is threatened by deforestation and over collection that has resulted in disappea ...
Bryophytes, the second largest group of land plants, are extremely rich in terpenoids, phenols, glycosides, and fatty acids. Although bryophytes could be used in medicine, their chemistry is not very well known and the problem remains to obtain enough quantity of same species for analysis. In vi ...
A bench-top bioreactor allowing continuous extraction of secondary metabolites is designed for Catharanthus roseus L. (G.) Don (periwinkle) and Santalum album L. (sandalwood) plant cell suspensions. Periwinkle cell cultures are exposed to biotic elicitors (Aspergillus niger, ...
Camptothecin derivatives are clinically used for the treatment of various human cancers. These derivatives are semi-synthesized from camptothecin which is isolated from the extracts of Camptotheca acuminata and Nothapodytes foetida. For the feasible production of camptot ...
Metabolomics constitutes a quantitative and qualitative survey of the whole metabolites of an organism as well as a tissue, reflecting the genome and proteome of a sample as analyzed. Advanced analytical spectroscopic and chromatographic techniques are used along with uni- or multiv ...
Podophyllotoxin is a plant-derived compound found in Podophyllum sp. that is used to produce semi-synthetic anticancer pharmaceuticals such as etoposide, teniposide, and etoposide phosphate. This chapter describes the role of biotechnology to produce podophyllotoxin and our ...
Plans by the space program to use plants for food supply and environmental regeneration have led to an examination of how plants grow in microgravity. Because secondary metabolic compounds are so important in determining the nutritional and flavor characteristics of plants—as well as ma ...
Plant cell culture technology is potentially useful in producing high-valued secondary metabolites. Eurycoma longifolia root extracts are consumed as a health tonic but more popularly used as an aphrodisiac. Studies on the aphrodisiac properties and the possible compounds invo ...
It is increasingly well accepted that addiction can be viewed as a form of neuronal plasticity, even as a type of very powerful, albeit maladaptive, learning. On a behavioral level, this can be conceptualized as the transition from experimentation to compulsive drug-seeking behavior. This v ...
High-mobility group box-1 (HMGB1) protein was originally described as a nuclear DNA-binding protein that functions as a structural cofactor critical for proper transcriptional regulation and gene expression. Recent studies indicate that damaged, necrotic cells liberate HMG ...
Drug addiction is a chronic relapsing disease with psychological and social factors (1). Compulsive drug-taking is a central feature of drug addiction (2–4). A major goal of drug abuse research is to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the development of the loss of co ...
