Diabetes mellitus (DM) is an important global public health problem. Despite the availability of drug therapy, patients have continued using plants with anti-diabetic properties as alternative treatments for diabetes. Cucurbita ficifolia Bouché (C. ficifolia) is a plant cultivated in Mexico for its edible fruit that is medicinally used to control type 2 DM (T2D). The hypoglycemic effect of C. f...

BACKGROUND The aqueous extract of Cucurbita ficifolia (C. ficifolia) fruit has demonstrated hypoglycemic effect, which may be attributed to some components in the extract. However, the major secondary metabolites in this fruit have not yet been identified and little is known about its extra-pancreatic action, in particular, on liver carbohydrate metabolism. Therefore, in addition to the isolati...

Phloem-specific proteins (P proteins) are particularly useful markers to investigate long-distance trafficking of macromolecules in plants. In this study, genus-specific molecular probes were used in combination with intergeneric grafts to reveal the presence of a pool of translocatable P protein subunits. Immunoblot analyses demonstrated that Cucurbita spp P proteins PP1 and PP2 are translocat...

A system for plant regeneration from individual cells or explants is essential for the application of genetic engineering. In Cucurbitaceae, in vitro regeneration has been reported across a wide spectrum of crops, including summer squash (Cucurbita pepo L.) (7), winter squash (Cucurbita maxima Duch.) (9), bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria Standl.) (6) and, recently, figleaf gourd (Cuburbita fic...

Interspecific hybridization is an important method to widen variations and to develop novel cultivars. Interspecific cross-pollination was carried out among three species of Cucurbita (C. moschata, C. ficifolia and C. martinezii) as male parents with ten cultivars of C. pepo as female parents. Only four cultivars of C. pepo (Eskandarani cv., Queen F , Jedida F and MHTC77 F ) were successful in ...