No abstract

Salinity is one of the major threats faced by the modern agriculture today. It causes multidimensional effects on plants. These effects depend upon the plant growth stage, intensity, and duration of the stress. All these lead to stunted growth and reduced yield, ultimately inducing economic loss to the farming community in particular and to the country in general. The soil conditions of agricultural land are deteriorating at an alarming rate. Plants assess the stress conditions, transmit the specific stress signals, and then initiate the response against that stress. A more complete understanding of plant response mechanisms and their practical incorporation in crop improvement is an essential step towards achieving the goal of sustainable agricultural development. Literature survey shows that investigations of plant stresses response mechanism are the focus area of research for plant scientists. Although these efforts lead to reveal different plant response mechanisms against salt stress, yet many questions still need to be answered to get a clear picture of plant strategy to cope with salt stress. Moreover, these studies have indicated the presence of a complicated network of different integrated pathways. In order to work in a progressive way, a review of current knowledge is critical. Therefore, this review aims to provide an overview of our understanding of plant response to salt stress and to indicate some important yet unexplored dynamics to improve our knowledge that could ultimately lead towards crop improvement.

Planomicrobium sp. MSSA-10 might be used as potent bioinoculant to relieve pea plants from deleterious effects of salinity.

Hepatitis C is a serious health issue and cause liver disorders in millions of people. Available therapeutic agents require long term administration with numerous side effects. Therefore, there is a dire need to find alternative treatment options for this disease. Since ancient times, medicinal plants are widely used to cure various diseases with no or less harmful effects. Therefore, this study was designed to find out phytochemicals and investigate antiviral activity of methanol extract of Ajuga bracteosa, Ajuga parviflora, Berberis lycium and Citrus lemon against Hepatitis C Virus (HCV infection). Phytochemical analysis of the plant extract was performed using various chemical tests. Toxicity of the plant extract was determined against using trypan blue exclusion method. Antiviral activity of the selected plant extract was find out against HCV infected HepG2 cells. For this purpose, HepG2 cells were seeded with HCV positive and negative serum and nontoxic doses of plant extract for 24 and 48 h. After this RNA was extracted and viral load was determined using Real-time PCR. Phytochemical analysis showed the presence of flavonoids and phenols in all plant extracts while amino acids, alkaloids and tannins were present in B. lycium and saponins were detected in C. lemon. Toxicity assay showed that all plant extracts were nontoxic at maximum concentration of 200 μg/ml except B. lycium, which showed mild toxicity at 40 μg/ml and were extremely toxic at 60 μg/ml and above doses. Real-time PCR quantitation result revealed that after 24 h treatments A. parviflora showed highest antiviral activity, followed by A. bracteosa, while B. lycium extract had low (35%) and C. lemon has no antiviral effects. The 48 h treatments showed an increase antiviral activity by A. bracteosa followed by A. parviflora and B. lycium while C. lemon showed negative effect. Our results depicted that mentioned plants might be used as an alternative therapeutic regime or in combination with existing treatments against HCV.

This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Plant Breed. Biotech. 2015 (June) 3(2):139~152 http://dx.ABSTRACT Simple sequence repeats (SSRs) have been the marker of choice for rice molecular breeding due to the high level of polymorphism, technical simplicity and low cost. Recent advances in rice genomics have led to the discovery of abundant single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) which have enormous potential for rice molecular breeding. To assess both marker systems for molecular breeding in rice, SSR and SNP markers were evaluated on a set of 23 genotypes representing indica germplasm for their usefulness in molecular research and breeding program. Seven hundred SSR and sequence tagged sites (STS) markers and 384 SNPs were screened for polymorphism. Highly polymorphic markers based on polymorphic information content (PIC) values were identified, which will be useful for molecular breeding. Data was used to identify an "indica genotyping set" based on high level of polymorphism, chromosome position and marker quality which will provide kits of markers for marker assisted selection (MAS). Genetic diversity analysis using SSR data was more consistent with pedigrees compared to analysis with SNP data indicating that more than 384 SNPs are required when elite indica breeding material is used. The results also indicated that there were polymorphic "blind spots" for the fixed SNP set suggesting that SSRs could still be used to complement fixed-SNP genotyping platforms for some molecular breeding applications.