Angustifolia

Angustifolia

The flowers are small greenish-white, clustered in short terminal corymbose racemes, 3-6 cm long x 3-7 cm in diameter. Boscia angustifolia flourishes during the cool part of the dry season.The fruits need a year to ripen .They are edible, though bitter, spherical, rough-skinned berries, up to 13 mm in diameter, reddish grey in colour (Orwa et al., 2009; Fici et al., 1993; Dougall et al., 1958). They contain 7 cream-coloured seeds (Orwa et al., 2009).One important characteristic of Boscia angustifolia is that it remains leafy for most of the year, with only one month of full defoliation. An observer in Burkina Faso reported that foliage began in mid-October. Full foliage was reached early November and continued until the end of the rainy season (late August). In early September, foliage started drying out and defoliation occurred abruptly (Doulkom, 2000).Flaveria angustifolia is an perennial herb up to 100 cm (39 in) tall. Leaves are long and narrow, up to 12 cm (4.7 in) long. One plant can produce numerous flower heads in a dense spiral array. Each head contains 5-7 yellow disc flowers. some heads contain no ray flowers but other heads in the same cluster may have one yellow ray flower. Cassia angustifolia Vahl. (commonly known as senna makkai or cassia senna), native to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen and also extensively cultivated in Pakistan, is a medicinal herb used traditionally to cure number of diseases like liver diseases, constipation, typhoid, cholera etc. This study was conducted to evaluate the in-vitro antimicrobial, antioxidant and anticancer assays and phytochemical constituents of aqueous and organic extracts of C. angustifolia leaves.The antimicrobial activities of C. angustifolia aqueous and organic (methanol, ethanol, acetone, ethyl acetate) extracts were investigated by the disk diffusion method. These extracts were further evaluated for antioxidant potential by the DPPH radical scavenging assay. Anticancer activities of the extracts were determined by the MTT colorimetric assay. The total phenolic and flavonoid contents of C. angustifolia extracts were evaluated by the Folin-Ciocalteu method and aluminum chloride colorimetric assay, respectively.

The structures of the bioactive compounds were elucidated by NMR and ESI-MS spectrometry.C. angustifolia Vahl. is a traditional medicinal plant belonging to the family Caesalpiniaceae. It is commonly known as senna makkai or cassia senna. C. angustifolia is native to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Yemen. It is a rapid-growing shrub 5–8 m tall, extensively cultivated for its fruit and leaves in hot arid areas of Pakistan [16]. This plant is recognized in British and USA pharmacopoeias [17]. The leaves and pods of C. angustifolia are used in the form of a decoction powder for intestinal worms as an anti-helmenthic. It is also widely used as an anti-pyretic in typhoid, splenic enlargements, cholera, laxative, anemia, toxicity and genotoxicity caused by Escherichia coli [16].Using a reverse genetic approach, we provide in this paper the genetic, biochemical, and physiological evidence for ANGUSTIFOLIA’s role in other new biological functions such as abiotic and biotic stress response in higher plants. The T-DNA knockout an-t1 mutant exhibits not only all the phenotypes of previously described angustifolia null mutants, but also copes better than wild type under dehydration and pathogen attack. The stress tolerance is accompanied by a steady-state modulation of cellular H

The involvement of the ANGUSTIFOLIA gene in abiotic/biotic stress responses is particularly novel. We, therefore, investigated the accumulation of selected abiotic/biotic stress responsive transcripts in WT and an-t1 to elucidate the role of ANGUSTIFOLIA in controlling stress response in higher plants (Figure 7A,B). Higher transcript levels of abiotic (drought) stress response genes was observed in the an-t1 mutant compared to WT under both control and drought stress conditions (Figure 7A,B). The osmotic/drought stress response gene, RD29A [18] was used here as the abiotic (drought) stress experimental control, while the actin gene was used as the internal loading control for the RT-PCR experiment.It is well established that ROS accumulation in plants as a result of stress response often leads to lipid peroxidation [19]. To assess the role of ANGUSTIFOLIA in preventing lipid peroxidation, we analyzed the accumulation of malondialdehyde (MDA)-derived from cellular lipid peroxidation in WT and an-t1 under both control and stress conditions (Table 2). The level of MDA accumulation in an-t1 was significantly lower than that of WT under stress conditions (Table 2).ANGUSTIFOLIA has been postulated to function by transcriptional repression [7]. These studies raised the possibility that ANGUSTIFOLIA might also have other unrelated microtubule-associated cytoplasmic functions. Recently, ANGUSTIFOLIA has been reported to function outside the nucleus, and exclusively through membrane trafficking pathways, localizing on punctuate structures around the Golgi [15]. To further understand the function of the AN gene beyond microtubule-associated cell morphogenesis regulation, we used the latest high throughput integrated knowledge base Arabidopsis protein interaction network analysis (ANAP) tool [20] to bring insights into the functional interaction protein network of ANGUSTIFOLIA at the cellular level. (Source: bmcplantbiol.biomedcentral.com)