Augmenting medicinal plant research through in vitro and in silico approach

Scientific Study from the year 2014 in the subject Biology - Botany, grade: 100.00, Meerut Institute of Technology, language: English, abstract: We carried out research out with the topic of tissue culture technology for the large scale and sustainable production of quality planting material of elite medicinal plants and developped a database of Indian medicinal plants with the following objectives: (1) Establishment of tissue culture protocol for seven medicinal plants. (2) Standardizing the physicochemical conditions for large-scale in vitro multiplication. (3) Standardization of various media types and growth regulators. (4) Studying the competency of in vitro plants to sustain the subculture durations. (5) Collection of data of medicinal plants for creating a database (an online webpage). (6) Compiling and designing of database. (7) Publishing the database online.

Medicinal plants are the great natural resources but due to lack of knowledge, arbitrary use and lack of conservation measures many important medicinal plant species are becoming extinct, endangered and threatened. In the present research, micropropagation studies were carried out on ten medicinal plants, showed best respond in seven medicinal plants among them.

Callus cultures and shoot cultures were successfully initiated on basal MS media supplemented with different plant growth regulators (2,4-D, NAA, IAA and BAP) of various concentrations. These can be beneficial aspect in future as for exporting or making available the plants to farmers of superior genotype. This would also facilitate in metabolite extraction and supply in drug industries.

An online static database in the form of a web site was also created named as "MedDBase". This database facilitates the medicinal as well as tissue culture information of all Indian medicinal plants. The list contained Indian medicinal plants more than 5000, is retrieved from the NMPB site and arranged in Alphabetical order. This online database will help the scientific community to keep themselves updated with the research and development work being carried out for a particular medicinal plant. This will also help in reducing duplication/ repetition of same work.