Abstract
This study addresses the in vitro culture as an alternative to obtain compounds with cytotoxic activity from the medicinal plant Jatropha curcas (Euphorbiaceae). We determined the presence of cytotoxic compounds in both whole plants and dedifferentiated cells. We evaluated the effect of auxin, cytokinins and light on callus induction in cotyledon explants. We found that the most effective combination to induce callus was the auxin 2,4-D (5 mM) with the cytokinin 6-BAP (2.5 mM), on Murashige-Skoog medium in darkness. We compared the callogenic potential among accessions from different geographic origins, finding that ARR-251107-MFG7 is most prone to form callus. The roots of J. curcas grown in field produced a compound chromatographically similar to the cytotoxic diterpene jatrophone. The profile of compounds extracted from the dedifferentiated cells was similar to that of the whole plant, including a relatively abundant stilbene-like compound. This study contributes to the future establishment of protocols to produce anti-cancer compounds from J. curcas cultivated in vitro.
Highlights
The search for less toxic and more potent anti-carcinogenic drugs is based on the fact that current drugs are scarcely selective and highly toxic to normal cells (Mohan, Koushik & Fuertes, 2012)
It was observed that exogenous phytohormones under any lighting condition did not influence the formation of callus, as they were statistically similar to the control (p ≤ 0.05)
A variety of compounds with cytotoxic activity isolated from J. curcas has been reported (Misra & Misra, 2010; Ravindranath et al, 2004; Van den Berg et al, 1995), our study focused on three compounds: jatrophone, jatropholones a and b which were
Summary
The search for less toxic and more potent anti-carcinogenic drugs is based on the fact that current drugs are scarcely selective and highly toxic to normal cells (Mohan, Koushik & Fuertes, 2012). The most promising sources of such molecules are plants, especially those used for herbal medicine (Alonso-Castro et al, 2011). In this sense, Jatropha curcas, a plant native to Mesoamerica and recently rediscovered due to its potential as a source of raw material for biofuels (Salvador-Figueroa et al, 2015), it has been used in traditional medicine by various peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (Kumar & Sharma, 2008). Among them are: jatrophol, a molecule with rodenticide activity (Jing et al, 2005), the curcusones a, b and c, and jatropholone A, with antineoplastic properties (Muangman, Thippornwong & Tohtong, How to cite this article Ovando-Medina et al (2016), Production of cytotoxic compounds in dedifferentiated cells of Jatropha curcas L.
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