الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract Plant secondary metabolites provide a wealth of medicinally useful compounds and play a crucial role in modern and traditional medicine. In some cases the compound of interest is easily identifiable, and can often be synthetically produced. However, in many cases it is not easy to determine whether the medicinal benefits are produced by one or several compounds or if they have additive or synergistic effects. In these instances a synthetic product cannot be produced and medicinal preparations will rely on plant material collected from the wild, grown using conventional cultivation techniques, or produced using in vitro methods. Echinacea spp. (family Asteraceae) herbal medicines and dietary supplements are traditionally used as immunostimulants in the treatment of inflammatory and viral diseases. Echinacea purpurea (L.) is an important commercial species. A great deal of research has indicated the chemical composition of Echinacea spp., including alkamides, caffeic acid derivatives (chicoric acid, caftaric acid and chlorogenic acid), and polysaccharides attracting claims of beneficial pharmacological activity. Echinacea is an example of plant species with medicinal activity that cannot be attributed to a single chemical, necessitating plant production to obtain the full spectrum of metabolite. Several compounds are thought to play significant roles in the efficacy of Echinacea products and are often used to ensure and test for quality. Thus developing artificial (controlled) culture systems with the aims of standardizing and improving production and marketing of medicinal species allows rapid propagation of plants selected for their active principles and improves the quality and quantity of natural pharmaceutical compounds. Accordingly, the current study aimed to establish plant cell lines capable of producing high yields of secondary compounds in cell suspension cultures as an alternative to conventional whole plant production to improve the productivity of locally cultivated Echinacea purpurea and to ensure that produced compounds are effective. The targeted group of compounds to be studied was the polyphenolics (caffeic acid derivatives).The long-term goal of our research is to aid in the development of effective therapeutic preparations of Echinacea, the goals of this particular project are 1. Establishment of callus cultures from explants isolated from plant material: Callus induction is necessary, as the first step, in many tissue culture experiments. Callus is produced when the initial response of the tissues to a wound is followed by the external addition of growth regulators in an aseptic medium in order to maintain the rapid cell division response and sustain it indefinitely. Calli can be obtained from almost any part of the plant; here the root was chosen to be the explant. Phytohormones, such as cytokinin and auxin, are necessary ingredients in any plant cell culture environment. Generally speaking, an equal proportion of auxin to cytokinin hormones in solution will impact only cell proliferation and result in the formation of callus masses. In our study callus induction was achieved using MS media supplemented with 1.5mg/L BA and 0.5mg/L NAA. |