Abstract
Steroids are a pivotal class of hormones with a key role in growth modulation and signal transduction in multicellular organisms. Synthetic steroids are widely used to cure large array of viral, fungal, bacterial, and cancerous infections. Brassinosteroids (BRs) are a natural collection of phytosterols, which have structural similarity with animal steroids. BRs are dispersed universally throughout the plant kingdom. These plant steroids are well known to modulate a plethora of physiological responses in plants leading to improvement in quality as well as yield of food crops. Moreover, they have been found to play imperative role in stress-fortification against various stresses in plants. Over a decade, BRs have conquered worldwide interest due to their diverse biological activities in animal systems. Recent studies have indicated anticancerous, antiangiogenic, antiviral, antigenotoxic, antifungal, and antibacterial bioactivities of BRs in the animal test systems. BRs inhibit replication of viruses and induce cytotoxic effects on cancerous cell lines. Keeping in view the biological activities of BRs, this review is an attempt to update the information about prospects of BRs in biomedical and clinical application.
Highlights
In living systems, biochemical interaction among cells is achieved by chemical messengers that pass between them
The results showed that BRs and its analog BR4848 can suppress in vitro angiogenesis of primary endothelial cells and inhibit angiogenesis and prevent the development of metastasis [50,69]
The first line of inner resistance to stress is swiftly induced by host recognition by presence of conserved structural motifs which is entirely articulated by pathogens
Summary
Biochemical interaction among cells is achieved by chemical messengers that pass between them. Steroidal in nature, have been reported in plants such as corticosteroids, estrone, progesterone, testosterone, and large number of analogues of these compounds [3,4]. Observation revealed transformation of cholesterol and sitosterol, applied on plants, to a wide array of steroid hormones present in animals. The immature seeds of plants and their pollens have been reported to have the highest concentration of BRs in them and are dependent upon the age of plants [23,24] Like their counterparts or similar analogue, BRs have a wide array of responses in various developmental and physiological functions of plants such as germination, regulation of gene expression, cellular and vegetative growth, differentiation of vasculature, root growth, apoptosis, homeostasis, and reproductive development [25,26,27,28]. The change in expression of apoptosis related proteins stimulated by BRs was different for different cell lines [51]
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