•Secondary metabolites are used in pharmaceutical industries, cosmetics, dietary supplements, fragrances, flavors, dyes, etc.•Metabolic engineering is an important biological tool to produce ...commercially importance metabolites.•The biosynthetic pathways for production of secondary metabolites in plants are derived from the shikimate, terpenoid, and polyketide pathways.•A huge number of medicinal plants and their metabolites have been produced by in vitro techniques.
Plants have been used throughout the world for its medicinal powers since ancient time. The pharmacological properties of plants are based on their phytochemical components especially the secondary metabolites which are outstanding sources of value added bioactive compounds. Secondary metabolites have complex chemical composition and are produced in response to various forms of stress to perform different physiological tasks in plants. They are used in pharmaceutical industries, cosmetics, dietary supplements, fragrances, flavors, dyes, etc. Extended use of these metabolites in various industrial sectors has initiated a need to focus research on increasing the production by employing plant tissue culture (PTC) techniques and optimizing their large scale production using bioreactors. PTC techniques being independent of climatic and geographical conditions will provide an incessant, sustainable, economical and viable production of secondary metabolites. This review article intends to assess the advantages of using plant tissue culture, distribution of important secondary metabolites in plant families, strategies involved for optimal metabolite production and the industrial importance of selected secondary metabolites.
Married at the age of eleven, Rukhmabai refused to go and live with her husband who had filed a suit for restitution of conjugal rights against her in 1884. This paper analyses the transplantation of ...the notion of restitution of conjugal rights into Hindu personal law in India at a time when child marriage was rife and there was no minimum age of marriage. Within this context Rukhmabai's case symbolises an important interjection in its attempt to posit lack of consent to an infant marriage as a defence against suits for restitution of conjugal rights. This marked a shift from female consent being understood as a question of physical maturity alone, to a claim of intelligent consent and the capacity to withhold such consent within an unconsummated marriage arranged in the girl's infancy. While analysing these notions of consent within colonial law the paper also closely scrutinises Rukhmabai's public writings to recover one of the earliest published Indian female views on the need for marital consent.
Continuous increase in global human population and depletion of natural resources of energy posing threat to environment needs, sustainable supply of food and energy. The most ecofriendly approach ...‘green technology’ has been exploited for biofertilizer preparation. Cyanobacteria are the most successful and sustained prokaryotic organism during the course of evolution. They are considered as one of the primitive life forms found on our planet. Cyanobacteria are emerging candidates for efficiently conversion of radiant energy into chemical energy. This biological system produces oxygen as a by-product. Cyanobacterial biomass can also be used for the large scale production of food, energy, biofertilizers, secondary metabolites, cosmetics and medicines. Therefore, cyanobacteria are used in ecofriendly sustainable agricultural practice for production of biomass of very high value and decreasing the level of CO2. This review article describes the methods of mass production of cyanobacterial biofertilizers and their applications in agriculture and industrial level.
•Cyanobacteria are emerging candidates for competently conversion of radiant energy into chemical energy.•Cyanobacteria are used in ecofriendly sustainable agricultural practice for production of biomass of very high value.•Cyanobacteria have an emerged potential as biofertilizer which are economical and environment friendly.•They are a promising source offering diverse functional foods, they are still underexplored as a natural resource.
Energy-efficient resource-optimization for multiple application scenarios requires appropriate clustering-based network-fractioning that skillfully removes unbalanced network connectivity, which is a ...stimulating bottleneck in WSN-performance. This paper proposes a new Uniform Connectivity-based clustering Protocol, called Lines-of-Uniformity based Enhanced-Threshold (LUET) to provide energy-efficient coverage in three-tier heterogeneous WSN. This protocol considers the node’s remnant-energy and its proximity from either of the lines of uniformity for lowering down average isolated node count in WSN. This paper also proposes a rotation epoch-based LUET variant, (LUET|R) that incorporates static epoch for initial clustering rounds until First-Node-Death to overcome the rapid fall after the death of the first node. The simulation model demonstrates the superiority of LUET and its variants over other established clustering protocols in terms of network-lifetime, power-efficiency, net death-rate, average isolated-nodes, throughput.
Liver disease is one of the leading comorbidities in HIV infection. The risk of liver fibrosis development is potentiated by alcohol abuse. In our previous studies, we reported that hepatocytes ...exposed to HIV and acetaldehyde undergo significant apoptosis, and the engulfment of apoptotic bodies (ABs) by hepatic stellate cells (HSC) potentiates their pro-fibrotic activation. However, in addition to hepatocytes, under the same conditions, ABs can be generated from liver-infiltrating immune cells. The goal of this study is to explore whether lymphocyte-derived ABs trigger HSC profibrotic activation as strongly as hepatocyte-derived ABs. ABs were generated from Huh7.5-CYP2E1 (RLW) cells and Jurkat cells treated with HIV+acetaldehyde and co-culture with HSC to induce their pro-fibrotic activation. ABs cargo was analyzed by proteomics. ABs generated from RLW, but not from Jurkat cells activated fibrogenic genes in HSC. This was driven by the expression of hepatocyte-specific proteins in ABs cargo. One of these proteins is Hepatocyte-Derived Growth Factor, for which suppression attenuates pro-fibrotic activation of HSC. In mice humanized with only immune cells but not human hepatocytes, infected with HIV and fed ethanol, liver fibrosis was not observed. We conclude that HIV+ABs of hepatocyte origin promote HSC activation, which potentially may lead to liver fibrosis progression.
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•Isolation of active principle compound was found maximum in acetone extract of L. inermis leaf.•Phytochemical tests suggest that carbohydrate, steroids, volatile oils, flavonoids, ...and tannins were found to be present in acetone extract of L. inermis leaf.•In vitro assay of antifungal activity of all column fractions fraction no. F1 which exhibited most significant antifungal activity against the test fungus.•GC–MS analysis of column fraction showed the occurrence of total 6 constituents.•The obtained constituents are hexacosane, octadecane, docosane, heptacosane methyl, octacosane, and tetracosane.
Plants produce a high diversity of natural products with a prominent function in the protection against microbial pathogens on the basis of their toxic effect on growth and reproduction. In the present study, effect of partially purified acetone fraction of L. inermis leaves on various cytomorphological parameters i.e. mycelium width, conidial size, etc. of test fungi and fraction was subjected to confirming the presence of primary and secondary metabolites by rapid qualitative phytochemical tests, chromatographic methods such as TLC, column chromatography, GC–MS, etc. which were responsible for the inhibition of growth of test pathogen conidial size of Curvularia lunata decreased up to 64.76% at 0.039 μg/ml concentration of the extract. Mycelial width of C. lunata increased up to 55.91% at 0.312 μg/ml concentration of the extract. Carbohydrate, steroids, volatile oils, flavonoids, and tannins were found to be present in acetone extract of L. inermis leaf. Total of 7 bands were observed in TLC fingerprinting of L. inermis acetone fraction. Total of 10 fractions were collected from the column chromatography. Fractions which show the most significant antifungal activity against the test fungus was subjected to further GC–MS analysis for the separation and identification of active principle. GC–MS analyses show the presence of total 6 constituents i.e. hexacosane, octadecane, docosane, heptacosane methyl, octacosane, and tetracosane.
Plants are the source of various natural compounds with pharmaceutical and nutraceutical importance which have shown numerous health benefits with relatively fewer side effects. However, extraction ...of these compounds from native producers cannot meet the ever-increasing demands of the growing population due to, among other things, the limited production of the active compound(s). Their production depends upon the metabolic demands of the plant and is also subjected to environmental conditions, abundance of crop species and seasonal variations. Moreover, their extraction from plants requires complex downstream processing and can also lead to the extinction of many useful plant varieties. Microbial engineering is one of the alternative approaches which can meet the global demand for natural products in an eco-friendly manner. Metabolic engineering of microbes or pathway reconstruction using synthetic biology tools and novel enzymes lead to the generation of a diversity of compounds (like flavonoids, stilbenes, anthocyanins etc.) and their natural and non-natural derivatives. Strain and pathway optimization, pathway regulation and tolerance engineering have produced microbial cell factories into which the metabolic pathway of plants can be introduced for the production of compounds of interest on an industrial scale in an economical and eco-friendly way. While microbial production of phytochemicals needs to further increase product titer if it is ever to become a commercial success. The present review covers the advancements made for the improvement of microbial cell factories in order to increase the product titer of recombinant polyphenolic compounds.
The P. longifolia mediated silver (PL-AgNPs) nanoparticles are very stable and efficient. UV–Vis spectroscopy, dynamic light scattering (DLS), X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron ...microscope (TEM), scanning electron microscope (SEM), and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) were used to characterize the produced AgNPs. UV–Vis analysis showed a characteristic peak at 435 nm corresponding to surface plasmon resonance. The synthesis process was spectrophotometrically optimized for various parameters. After optimization, highly stable AgNPs were prepared using 3.0 ml of P. longifolia leaf extract, pH 7.0, 1.0 mM AgNO3, and 60 °C. The zeta potential was measured by DLS, which showed −20.8 mV and the PDI value was 5.42. TEM and SEM analysis shows a spherical shape of the synthesized nanoparticles, and the size was measured between 10 and 40 nm. EDX analysis showed intense peaks from silver and oxygen and small peaks from various metal atoms such as Na, P, S and Al indicating their presence in trace amounts. The average size of the PL-AgNPs was 14 nm. The phytochemical analysis shows that the presence of alkaloids, essential oils and saponins seems to be responsible for the synthesis of nanoparticles. PL-AgNPs were further investigated for their antifungal activity against Alternaria alternata. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC), minimum fungicidal concentration (MFC) and effect of nanoparticles on cytomorphology of A. alternata have also been reported. Biosynthesized nanoparticles have proven to be inexpensive, environmentally friendly, stable, easily reproducible, and highly effective against plant-pathogenic fungi.
•Green synthesis of AgNPs using aqueous leaf extract of Polyalthia longifolia.•Characterization using UV–vis, DLS, XRD, TEM, SEM, EDX.•Optimization of AgNPs at different Temperature, pH, Concentration and Time.•Nanoparticles were stable for more than 5 months.•The antifungal activity of the AgNPs against A. alternata were studied.
In Brassica oleracea, heterosis is the most efficient tool providing impetus to hybrid vegetable industry. In this context, we presented the first report on identifying superior heterotic crosses for ...yield and commercial traits in cauliflower involving cytoplasmic male sterile (CMS) and doubled haploid (DH) lines as parents. We studied the suitability of genomic-SSRs and EST-SSRs based genetic distance (GD) and agronomic trait based phenotypic distance (PD) for predicting heterosis in F1 hybrids using CMS and DH based parents. 120 F1 hybrids derived from 20Ogura based CMS lines and 6 DH based testers were evaluated for 16 agronomic traits along with the 26 parental lines and 4 commercial standard checks. The genomic-SSRs and EST-SSRs based genetic structure analysis grouped the 26 parental lines into 4 distinct clusters. The CMS lines Ogu118-6A, Ogu33A, Ogu34-1A were good general combiner for developing early maturity hybrids. The SCA effects were significantly associated with heterosis suggesting non-additive gene effects for the heterotic response of hybrids. Less than unity value of σ2A/D coupled with σ2gca/σ2sca indicated the predominance of non-additive gene action in the expression of studied traits. The correlation analysis of genetic distance with heterosis for commercial traits suggested that microsatellites based genetic distance estimates can be helpful in heterosis prediction to some extent.
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