The medicinal plant, Catharanthus roseus, accumulates wide range of terpenoid indole alkaloids, which are well documented therapeutic agents. In this study, deep transcriptome sequencing of C. roseus was carried out to identify the pathways and enzymes (genes) involved in biosynthesis of these compounds. About 343 million reads were generated from different tissues (leaf, flower and root) of C....

BACKGROUND Catharanthus roseus L (C. roseus) has been used to treat a wide assortment of diseases including diabetes. The objective of our study was to evaluate the antimicrobial and wound healing activity of the flower extract of Catharanthus in rats. METHODS Wound healing activity was determined in rats, after administration (100 mg kg-1 day-1) of the ethanol extract of C. roseus flower, us...

Induced mutagenesis is best approach for creation of genetic variability but most of interest is paid towards crop plants with only a few exceptions. But even widely used medicinal plants could receive a little attention in this direction. Catharanthus roseus is an important plant medicinal plant yielding antihypertensive alkaloid ajmalcine and anticancerous alkaloid vincristine and vinblastine...

Gloriosa superba and Catharanthus roseus are useful in traditional medicine for treatment of various skin diseases and cancer. However, their molecular effect on psoriasis has not been investigated. In this study, the effect of ethanol extracts derived from G. superba leaves and C. roseus stems on the expression of psoriatic marker, keratin 17 (K17), was investigated in human keratinocytes usin...

The administration of Plumbago zeylanica root (50% EtOH) extract to |intact rats at the dose of 150 mg/kg [body weight for 60 days caused arrest of spermatogenesis. The diameter of seminiferous tubules and Leydig cell nuclei were reduced. The production of spermatocytes (primary and secondary) and spermatids were significantly reduced (P£ 0.001; 83.57%, 89.69% and 69.47% respectively). The tota...

The tetraploid plants of Catharanthus roseus (L.) G. Don was obtained by colchicine induction from seeds explants, and the ploidy of the plants was identified by flow cytometry. The optimal treatment is 0.2% colchicine solution treated for 24 hours, and the induction rate reaches up to 30%. Comparing with morphological characteristics and growth habits between tetraploids and the control, we fo...

No study has been performed on identifying microRNAs (miRNAs) and their targets in the medicinal plant, Catharanthus roseus. In the present study, using the comparative genomics approach, we have predicted two potential C. roseus miRNAs. Furthermore, twelve potential mRNA targets were identified in C. roseus genome based on the characteristics that miRNAs exhibit perfect or nearly perfect compl...

A comprehensive metabolomic profiling of Catharanthus roseus L. G. Don infected by 10 types of phytoplasmas was carried out using one-dimensional and two-dimensional NMR spectroscopy followed by principal component analysis (PCA), an unsupervised clustering method requiring no knowledge of the data set and used to reduce the dimensionality of multivariate data while preserving most of the varia...

Catharanthus roseus (= Vinca rosea), Adenine Phosphori­ bosyltransferase, Subcellular D istribution, Mitochondria, Purine Salvage Subcellular localization of adenine phosphoribosyltrans­ ferase was examined in Catharanthus roseus cells. At least 13% of the activity was observed in the particulate fraction with the rest observed in the cytosol. Both differential and Percoll density gradient cent...

Catharanthus roseus produces a large array of terpenoid indole alkaloids (TIAs) that are an important source of natural or semisynthetic anticancer drugs. The biosynthesis of TIAs is tissue specific and induced by certain phytohormones and fungal elicitors, indicating the involvement of a complex transcriptional control network. However, the transcriptional regulation of the TIA pathway is poor...