Plants are natural sources of bioactive compounds, and the intensive use of wild plants to obtain them, in particular secondary metabolites, depletes natural biocenoses. Instead, modern biotechnological methods, especially cell and tissue culture in vitro, make it possible to get environmentally friendly, highly productive plant raw materials that are able to synthesize and accumulate specialized substances, which are valuable for pharmacology, cosmetology, and medicine. Regenerating in vitro-plants of different plant species such as Acorus calamus L., Phalaenopsis sp. were obtained in our research. It was proved that by changing the cultivation conditions it is possible to change the content of substances of secondary metabolites in explants and in the nutrient medium under aseptic culture.
Aim. To find out the biochemical peculiarities of Acorus calamus L of the two genotypes, acquired from different populations, an analysis of phenolic compounds in explant tissues and in nutrient medium in vitro was conducted. Methods. Plants, acquired by microclonal multiplication were studied. To detect general phenol content, Folin–Ciocalteu reagent was used, for flavonoid content - zirconium chloride crystallohydrate nitrate (IV). Xanthone content was identified by Vysochina G.I. and Kukushkina T.A. methods with our own modifications. The extracts were studied using spectrophotometric measurements. Results. Tissues of A. calamus and the nutrient medium contained different amount of phenolic compounds, depending on parent plant origin and in vitro cultivation duration. Conclusions. Since the explants were cultivated in identical conditions, the difference of phenolic compound content both in tissues and nutrient medium indicates genetic variability of A. calamus plants on population level.
Key words. Acorus calamus, culture in vitro, phenols, flavonoids, xanthones.
In recent years, xanthones have received considerable attention from scientists due to their biological activity: anticarcinogenic, antiviral, antibacterial, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and other properties.Therefore they are useful for prevention and treatment of different diseases:cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, cardiovascular disorders, diabetes, etc. Extracts of different species of plants containing xanthones are components of chemotherapeutic and other medical drugs. In order to find the most sensitive and environmentally safe method of quantitative determination of xanthones in the plant material and the nutrient medium, known methods were tested and selected for the prototype Vyisochina G. I. et al., 2011 method, which uses ethanol as an extractor. As the plant material we used plants of different species that were grown under in vitro cultivation conditions on the agarized nutrient medium. This agarized nutrient medium was also used for the xanthone content analysis. Based on the performed research, modifications of the method for determining the content of xanthones were adapted to the in vitro conditions, which detail the specificity of extraction and quantitative calculation of the xanthone content in plant explants. Our own method of determination of these compounds in the agarized nutrient medium was developed as well. The method, that we proposed, will significantly speed up the process of xanthone detecting and will also increase their yield in biotechnological processes for obtaining the pharmacologically valuable secondary metabolites of phenolic nature.
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