• CELLMED
• /
• v.6 no.1
• /
• pp.3.1-3.4
• /
• 2016

Consumption of herbal products from the medicinal plants contaminated with heavy metals can cause serious consequences on human health. This is a major concern for traditional and herbal medicine. The present study was carried out to analyze and quantify the levels of six potentially toxic heavy metals namely arsenic, lead, cadmium, mercury, chromium and nickel in ten important Indian medicinal herbs. The air dried raw herbs were processed by microwave assisted wet digestion and analyzed by using atomic absorption spectrophotometer equipped with graphite tube atomizer. Except the chromium content in three plants, all the levels of six heavy metals analyzed were found to be quite below the permissible limits in all the ten raw medicinal herbs analyzed. The present work implies that, regular and systematic screening of raw medicinal herbs is necessary to check the levels of the heavy metal contaminants before using them for consumption or preparation of herbal formulations so that the possible contamination cannot cumulate up to the finished products.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural Science
• /
• v.43 no.1
• /
• pp.21-27
• /
• 2016

Apple stem grooving virus (ASGV), Apple chlorotic leaf spot virus (ACLSV), and Apple stem pitting virus (ASPV) have been known to induce top working disease causing economical damage in apple. Occurrences of these three viruses in pome fruit trees, including apple, have been reported around the world. The transmission of the three viruses was reported by grafting, and there was no report of transmission through mechanical contact, insect vector, or seed except some herbaceous hosts of ASGV. As RNA extraction methods for fruit trees, Reverse Transcriptase-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) and multiplex RT-PCR techniques have been improved for reliability and stability, and low titer viruses that could not be detected in the past have become detectable. We studied the seed transmission ability of three apple viruses through apple seedling diagnosis using RT-PCR. Nineteen seeds obtained from commercially grown apple were germinated and two of the resulting plants were ASGV positive. Seven clones of the amplified ASGV coat protein (CP) genes of these isolates were sequenced. Overall sequence identities were 99.84% (nucleotide) and 99.76% (amino acid). Presence of a previously unreported single nucleotide and amino acid variation conserved in all of these clones suggests a possible association with seed transmission of these 'S' isolates. A phylogenetic tree constructed using ASGV CP nucleotide sequences showed that isolate S sequences were grouped with Korean, Chinese, Indian isolates from apple and Indian isolates from kiwi.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
• /
• v.21 no.9
• /
• pp.937-946
• /
• 2011

Several isolates of Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) were screened for the vegetative insecticidal protein (Vip) effective against sap-sucking insect pests. Screening results were based on $LC_{50}$ values against cotton aphid (Aphis gossypii), one of the dangerous pests of various crop plants including cotton. Among the isolates, the Bt#BREF24 showed promising results, and upon purification the aphidicidal protein was recognized as a binary toxin. One of the components of this binary toxin was identified by peptide sequencing to be a homolog of Vip2A that has been reported previously in other Bacillus spp. Vip2 belongs to the binary toxin group Vip1-Vip2, and is responsible for the enzymatic activity; and Vip1 is the translocation and receptor binding protein. The two genes encoding the corresponding proteins of the binary toxin, designated as vip2Ae and vip1Ae, were cloned from the Bt#BREF24, sequenced, and heterologously expressed in Escherichia coli. Aphid feeding assay with the recombinant proteins confirmed that these proteins are indeed the two components of the binary toxins, and the presence of both partners is essential for the activity. Aphid specificity of the binary toxin was further verified by ligand blotting experiment, which identified an ~50 kDa receptor in the brush border membrane vesicles of the cotton aphids only, but not in the lepidopteran insects. Our finding holds a promise of its use in future as a candidate gene for developing transgenic crop plants tolerant against sap-sucking insect pests.

• Journal of Ginseng Research
• /
• v.42 no.2
• /
• pp.158-164
• /
• 2018

Background: The study was carried out to assess the genetic variability present in ashwagandha and to examine the nature of associations of various traits to the root yield of the plant. Methods: Fifty-three diverse genetic stocks of ashwagandha (Withania somnifera) were evaluated for 14 quantitative characteristics. Analysis of variance, correlation, and path coefficient analysis were performed using the mean data of 2 years. Results: Analysis of variance revealed that the genotypes differed significantly for all characteristics studied. High heritability in conjunction with high genetic advance was observed for fresh root weight, 12 deoxywithastramonolide in roots, and plant height, which indicated that selection could be effective for these traits. Dry root weight has a tight linkage with plant height and fresh root weight. Further, in path coefficient analysis, fresh root weight, total alkaloid (%) in leaves, and 12 deoxywithastramonolide (%) in roots had the highest positive direct effect on dry root weight. Conclusion: Therefore, these characteristics can be exploited to improve dry root weight in ashwagandha genotypes and there is also scope for the selection of promising and specific chemotypes (based on the alkaloid content) from the present germplasm.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.15 no.10
• /
• pp.3708-3728
• /
• 2021

Indian herbal plants are used in agriculture and in the food, cosmetics, and pharmaceutical industries. Laboratory-based tests are routinely used to identify and classify similar herb species by analyzing their internal cell structures. In this paper, we have applied computer vision techniques to do the same. The original leaf image was preprocessed using the Chan-Vese active contour segmentation algorithm to efface the background from the image by setting the contraction bias as (v) -1 and smoothing factor (µ) as 0.5, and bringing the initial contour close to the image boundary. Thereafter the segmented grayscale image was fed to a leaky capacitance fired neuron model (LCFN), which differentiates between similar herbs by combining different groups of pixels in the leaf image. The LFCN's decay constant (f), decay constant (g) and threshold (h) parameters were empirically assigned as 0.7, 0.6 and h=18 to generate the 1D feature vector. The LCFN time sequence identified the internal leaf structure at different iterations. Our proposed framework was tested against newly collected herbal species of natural images, geometrically variant images in terms of size, orientation and position. The 1D sequence and shape features of aloe, betel, Indian borage, bittergourd, grape, insulin herb, guava, mango, nilavembu, nithiyakalyani, sweet basil and pomegranate were fed into the 5-fold Bayesian regularization neural network (BRNN), K-nearest neighbors (KNN), support vector machine (SVM), and ensemble classifier to obtain the highest classification accuracy of 91.19%.

• The Korean Journal of Ecology
• /
• v.25 no.5
• /
• pp.315-320
• /
• 2002

Phytoremediation of soil contaminated with cadmium was studied using Indian mallow (Abutilon avicennae) in columns packed with 80 mg Cd/kg soil. At 90 days after transplat, root biomass of the exposed plants was 4 times more inhibited compared to the control. Also, shoot length of the exposed plants was 3 times more inhibited than that of control plants. Accumulation of cadmium into tissues was in the order roots> stems> leaves during the 50 days, but the order was roots> stems> seeds> leaves during the 90 days after transplant. Regardless of cadmium contaminations, microbial activities were significantly greater in soil with plants than without plants. In soil column, cadmium was not transferred toward the lower part. Uptake of Cd by plant tissues was about 3.5% of the initial bioavailable cadmium for leaves, stems, and roots during the 90 days after transplant.

• Korean Journal of Food Science and Technology
• /
• v.2 no.2
• /
• pp.17-25
• /
• 1970

Juice were extracted from fresh leaves of 70 species of plants growing in Korea by mincing and pressing the resulting pulp through a cotton cloth. Leaf protein concentrates could be prepared from many species of land and water plants that are at present economically unimportant. The choice of plants is of considerable important. Total-N, protein-N and pH determinations were made on the extracts, and total-N remaining in the fibre were calculated. Leaf protein concentrates were precipitated from the extracts at $75{\sim}80^{\circ}C$, and analysed total-N as protein-N of products. The present paper deals with the calculated yields of leaf protein concentrates from various plants, relations between yield of leaf protein concentrates and total-N of leaves, or pH of extracts, and the amino acid compositions of leaf protein concentrates. Results are summarized as follows. 1. Spinach and radish were the best sources of easily extractable, but good results were also obtained with indian mustard, kail, chenopod, red bean, cucumber, squash, houndberry, white flowered gourd, potato, Humulus japonicus, arrowroot and soybean as a good resources for the production of leaf protein concentrates. 2. In general, the greater the protein content of leaves the greater the yield of leaf protein concentrates. However, there are some plants difficult to make a adequate protein extraction by a simple mechanical process. 3. It was to be expected that leaf protein concentrates would be more extractable with the higher pH of extracts. There were a poor yield of the leaf protein concentrate in the pH values lower than 5.50 of the first extracts. 4. Protein content of the leaf protein concentrate shows marked differences, depending on species and season. It ranged between 29 to 80% of protein contents. However, the majority of plants yielded products containing more than 50% of protein. Products containing more than 75% of protein were obtained from two species of radish and indian mustard. Cabbage and Digitaria sanguinalis cilialis (summer) made products containing 29 to 32% of protein. 5. The amino acid composition of leaf protein concentrates was not greatly altered by species of plants. On an amino acid compositional basis, the leaf protein concentrate has a favorable balance of essential and non-essential amino acids, the only exception being methionine, which was usually low in all cases.

• CELLMED
• /
• v.3 no.4
• /
• pp.31.1-31.8
• /
• 2013

This study has been geared to document primary information on common complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) used to treat and/or manage common dermatological disorders in Mauritius, a tropical multicultural island in the Indian Ocean. Data from 355 key informants was collected via a semi-structured questionnaire. Pearson correlation and Chi-squared test were performed to delineate any association. Quantitative indexes including the Importance Value (IV) and fidelity value were calculated. Results tend to indicate that cultural reasons were behind the use of CAM among Mauritians and traditional knowledge was mainly acquired either from parents/relatives or from self-experience. Among the medicinal plants mentioned, Aziadiracta indica (IV = 0.78) and Paederia tomentosa (IV = 0.70) were found to be most used plants. Calendula officinalis (IV = 0.15), Centella asiatica (IV = 0.22) and Agauria salicifolia (IV = 0.11) were also recorded to be used for common dermatological disorders though greatly under-utilised. Animal products were mentioned by 38.0% respondents and cow ghee was found to be commonly used in the management of measles (IV = 0.88). Spiritual healing was found to be used mainly for measles and warts. Given the plethora of novel information documented from the present survey, it can be suggested that the Mauritian population still relies to a great extent on CAM which needs to be preserved and used sustainably. Nonetheless, further investigation is required to probe the possible active constituents that could be the basis of an evidence based investigation to discover new drugs.

• Journal of Plant Biotechnology
• /
• v.36 no.1
• /
• pp.81-86
• /
• 2009

An efficient and reproducible plant regeneration system was established using transverse thin cell layers (tTCLs) in five cultivars of Brassjca juncea L. The effects of medium conditions, explant types (tTCLs of hypcotyl and cotyledonary petiole) on shoot regeneration were examined in this study. The maximum shoot regeneration frequency was obtained in Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium supplemented with 4 mg/L 6-benzylaminopurine (BA) and 0.2 mg/L 1-naphthaleneacetic acid (NAA). The hypocotyls derived tTCL explants had more shoot regeneration frequency (52%) than the cotyledonary petiole derived tTCL explants. Shoot induction was further improved by the addition of silver nitrate ($AgNO_3$) in the regeneration medium. A significant genotypic effect was also observed between the five cultivars; Rai-5 displayed higher capacities to produce shoots than other cultivars. Regenerated shoots were rooted on MS basal medium without PGRs which induced 90% of roots. The plantlets established in greenhouse conditions with 99% survival, flowered normally and set seeds. The regenerated plants were fertile and identical to source plants.

• Research in Plant Disease
• /
• v.12 no.2
• /
• pp.148-151
• /
• 2006

Tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV) was occurred newly on the 4 ornamental plants of Impatiens balsamina (Balsam), Dahlia variabilis (Dahlia), Callistephus chinensis (Aster) and Zinnia elegans (Indian lilac) at Anyang area in Korea. TSWV produced the typical symptoms of single or double ring spots on the leaves and induced usually necrosis, wilt and/or severe mosaic.