HPLC Profiling of B Asarone Content and Cytogenetic Studies of Medicinally Important Indian Acorus Calamus l., Accessions

Acorus calamus L. is a well- known herb for its traditional medicinal and pharmaceutical potentials. The rhizome of the plant is mainly used for medicinal purposes because it yields an essential oil known as “Calamus Oil”. The main component of the essential oil is â-asarone. In our present study, 20 different species of Acorus calamus were collected from different parts of South India and North East India. An attempt has been made to characterize all the accessions on the basis of their ploidy level by cytogenetic studies, and determining â- asarone content by HPLC analysis. All the accessions were screened for their ploidy level by staining the root chromosomes at metaphase stage. The plants observed were either diploid or triploid ruling out any tetraploids. HPLC analysis of powdered rhizome extracts for the â- asarone, indicated that it ranged from 2.2% to 7.2%. Our results also have revealed that there is no correlation between the ploidy status and the content of â-asarone. Indian accessions were found to have low to moderate levels of â- asarone content

Molecular characterization of medicinal and aromatic plants by 5S rRNA NTS and PCR RFLP- A mini review

The use of plants and plant products for medicine is being practiced from time immemorial. The advent of herbal drug technology has led to the production of medicines and pharmaceutical products from herbs. Secondary metabolites from plants are important economically as drugs, fragrances, pigments, food additives and pesticides. In order to protect consumers from adulteration and for conservation of the plants; authentication and identification of medicinal plants is essential. Traditionally, morphological, phytochemical and analytical techniques are used. In recent times molecular marker based methods are used widely. With the advent of PCR based techniques minute quantities of DNA in order of nanograms are sufficient for molecular analysis. These techniques are more advantageous than the classical morphology based or chemical and analytical methods. Recently the nontranscribed sequence (NTS) region of 5S rRNA has been employed for studying intra specific discrimination. In this short review an attempt has been made to study the use of 5S -rRNA NTS region for molecular fingerprinting in plants