Abstract
Picrorhiza kurroa grown in the Northwestern Himalayan region is used in various herbal formulations but extensive harvesting of this plant has led it to near extinction. The active constituents responsible for the medicinal properties of P. kurroa have been identified as picroside-I and picroside-II which are present in a particular ratio (1 : 1.5) in herbal formulations like Picroliv. The biosynthetic pathway of picrosides has been partially deciphered till date and needs to be elucidated completely. Review of literature revealed that no information is available as of today on the proteome analysis of Picrorhiza kurroa w.r.t. picroside-II biosynthesis. Therefore, with the aim of identifying proteins associated with picroside biosynthesis in Picrorhiza kurroa, differential protein expression was studied under picroside accumulating versus nonaccumulating conditions using SDS-PAGE. A total of 19 differentially expressed proteins were identified using MALDI-TOF/TOF MS followed by MASCOT search. Proteins involved in diverse functions were identified amongst which the most important proteins were glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase, 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylate oxidase, photosystem I reaction centre subunit V, 2-oxoglutarate ferrous-dependent oxygenase and putative cytochrome P450 superfamily protein because of their role in picroside biosynthesis. These identified proteins provide an insight and a basic platform for thorough understanding of biosynthesis of secondary metabolites and various other physiological processes of P. kurroa.
Highlights
Plants have become an important part of our daily lifestyle
Herbal formulations meant for treating hepatic disorders use a particular ratio of picroside-I and picrosideII as the main active components
It becomes all the more important to study their biosynthesis so as to understand their biosynthesis within P. kurroa which is partially known till date
Summary
Plants have become an important part of our daily lifestyle. For several years, intensive studies have been carried out on various plant constituents and their nutrition value [1]. It has been generally observed that a particular medicinal property is inherent to a specific plantspecies or groups which is in congruence with the fact that taxonomically distinct plants possess different combination of secondary metabolites [5]. One such medicinal plant is Picrorhiza kurroa which is a perennial medicinal herb belonging to family Scrophulariaceae found in northwestern Himalayas at an altitude from 3000 m to 4300 m [6,7,8]. In modern system of medicine, it is widely used as a hepatoprotective [6,7,8,9,10,11], anticarcinogenic [12], antioxidant [7, 8, 11, 13, 14], antiallergic [8], antiasthmatic [8, 11, 15], immunomodulatory [8, 11, 14], superoxide scavenging [10], antidiabetic [16], and immunostimulant [8, 17]
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