Project description:Evaluating the risks and benefits of using traditional medicinal plants is of utmost importance for a huge fraction of the human population, in particular in Northern Vietnam. Zebrafish are increasingly used as a simple vertebrate model for testing toxic and physiological effects of compounds, especially on development. Here, we tested 12 ethanolic extracts from popular medicinal plants collected in Northern Vietnam for their effects on zebrafish survival and development during the first 4 days after fertilization. We characterized more in detail their effects on epiboly, hatching, growth, necrosis, body curvature, angiogenesis, skeletal development and mostly increased movement behavior. Finally, we confirm the effect on epiboly caused by the Mahonia bealei extract by staining the actin filaments and show that this extract also inhibits cell migration of mouse embryo fibroblasts. In conclusion, we show that zebrafish early life stages reveal that traditional medicinal plant extracts are able to affect embryo development to various degrees, prompting caution to apply these medications to pregnant women. In addition, we show that an extract causing delay in epiboly also inhibits mammalian cell migration, suggesting that this effect may serve as a preliminary test for identifying extracts that inhibit cancer metastasis.
Project description:Asterids is one of the major plant clades comprising of many commercially important medicinal species. One of the major concerns in medicinal plant industry is adulteration/contamination resulting from misidentification of herbal plants. This study reports the construction and validation of a microarray capable of fingerprinting medicinally important species from the Asterids clade.
2014-07-31 | GSE31242 | GEO
Project description:Methane emission and its mitigation
Project description:We investigated the effects of the crude extract of a South African medicinal plant, Cotyledon orbiculata, on cell survival of colon (HCT116) cancer cell lines. Using RNASeq, we discovered that the extract interfered with mRNA regulatory pathways. Here, we found that the extract of Cotyledon orbiculata, a South African medicinal plant, had an anti-proliferative effect in cancer cells, mediated by apoptosis induced by alternative splicing of hnRNPA2B1 and BCL2L1.
Project description:Plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) are soil microbes that can promote plant growth and/or increase plant resistance to one or multiple stress conditions. These natural resources are environmentally friendly tools for reducing the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and for improving the nutritional quality of plants, including pharmacological metabolites. Coriander (Coriandrum sativumL.), commonly known as cilantro or Chinese parsley, is a worldwide culinary and medicinal plant with both nutritional and medicinal properties. Little is known about how PGPR may promote plant growth or affect metabolite profiles in coriander. Here, by usingAeromonassp. H1 that is a PGPR strain, we investigate how coriander yield and quality could be affected by PGPR with transcriptome insights.
Project description:RNA-Seq profiling of Methylomicrobium alcaliphilum strain 20Z grown in batch on methane. The RNA-Seq work is one part of a systems approach to characterizing metabolism of 20Z during growth on methane. We demonstrate that methane assimilation is coupled with a highly efficient pyrophosphate-mediated glycolytic pathway, which under O2 limitation participates in a novel form of fermentation-based methanotrophy. This surprising discovery suggests a novel mode of methane utilization in oxygen-limited environments, and opens new opportunities for a modular approach towards producing a variety of excreted chemical products using methane as a feedstock.