Malaria is a vector-borne infectious disease caused by the protozoan Plasmodium parasites. Each year, it causes disease in approximately 515 million people and kills between one and three million people, the majority of whom are young children in sub-Saharan Africa. It is widespread in tropical and subtropical regions, including parts of the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Due to climate change and...

Artemisia species are one of the many traditional medicinal plants of Ethiopia used for the treatment of infectious and non-infectious health problems. In the present study, eight extracts prepared from leaves and aerial parts of four Artemisia species (Artemisia absinthium, A. abyssinica, A. afra, and A. annua) growing in Ethiopia were tested in vitro against bloodstream forms of Trypanosoma b...

The phytohormone abscisic acid (ABA) plays an important role in plant development and environmental stress response. Additionally, ABA also regulates secondary metabolism such as artemisinin in the medicinal plant Artemisia annua L. Although an earlier study showed that ABA receptor, AaPYL9, plays a positive role in ABA-induced artemisinin content improvement, many components in the ABA signali...

Plants synthesize a great variety of isoprenoid products that are required not only for normal growth and development but also for their adaptive responses to environmental challenges. However, despite the remarkable diversity in the structure and function of plant isoprenoids, they all originate from a single metabolic precursor, mevalonic acid. The synthesis of mevalonic acid is catalysed by ...

Artemisia annua is an important medicinal crop used for the production of the anti-malarial compound artemisinin. In order to assist in the production of affordable high quality artemisinin we have carried out an A. annua breeding programme aimed at improving artemisinin concentration and biomass. Here we report on a combining ability analysis of a diallel cross to identify robust parental line...

the effects of methanolic extract and leaf powder of artemisia annua were studied on performance, cellular and humoral immunity in 240 cobb broiler chicks in a completely randomized design. control group did not receive any treatment. the chicks in the second and third groups were fed with feed which contained 2000 and 4000 ppm plant extract in diet and in the groups 4, 5 and 6 chicks received ...

Studying the biochemical responses of different plant species to insect herbivory may help improve our understanding of the evolution of defensive metabolites found in host plants and their role in plant-herbivore interactions. Untargeted metabolic fingerprints measured as individual mass features were used to compare metabolite reactions in three Brassicales host-plant species (Cleome spinosa,...

The need for reproductive assurance during dispersal, along with the pressure of local mate competition, means that the importance of frequent or repeated colonization is implicit in the literature on sexual system evolution. However, there have been few empirical tests of the association between colonization history and sexual system in plants, and none within a single species. Here we use pat...

Artemisia annua is the source of antimalarial phytomolecule, artemisinin. It is mainly produced and stored in the glandular secretory trichomes present in the leaves of the plant. Since, the artemisinin biosynthesis steps are yet to be worked out, in this investigation a microarray chip was strategized for the first time to shortlist the differentially expressing genes at a stage of plant produ...

Detached 3-week-old leaves of Agrostis palustris, Lolium perenne, Poa annua, and Poa pratensis were inoculated with conidial suspensions of two isolates of Colletotrichum graminicola obtained from A. palustris. Inoculated leaves were incubated at 23 degrees C under high relative humidity (>95%). The infection process was investigated by light microscopy from 2 to 168 h after inoculation (AI). S...