DOI: 10.5176/978-981-08-8119-1_BioTech2011_22
Authors: Ainul Zura Zulkepli and Azman Abd Samad
Abstract:
Catharanthus roseus, the Madagascar periwinkle belongs to the family of Apocynaceae. The plants contain pharmaceutically active secondary metabolites known as terpenoid indole alkaloids such as
ajmalicine, catharanthine, vindoline, vincristine and vinblastine. Vincristine and vinblastine alkaloids are extensively used for chemotherapy for many types of cancers and also for the treatment of urinary disorders and blood pressure (Verpoorte et al., 1993; Liu et al. 2007). These alkaloids are extracted mostly from the leaves of C. roseus. The contents of alkaloids particularly vincristine and vinblastine in the raw material derived from naturally occurring whole plant however are present in trace quantities only, or they are not produced at all by undifferentiated systems such as callus and suspension culture. Development of efficient plant micropropagation techniques and methods for large scale in vitro root and shoot cultivation of C. roseus may become the solution for collecting the raw materials for the recovery of indole alkaloids (Petriosiuk et al., 2007).
C. roseus had been reported regenerated successfully from in vitro cultures using various techniques including somatic embryogenesis (Junaid et al., 2007), zygotic embryo culture (Kim et al., 2004), and organogenesis (Murugesan et. al, 2008). Hirata et al. (1994) proved that plant growth regulators and phytohormones are essential for the growth of C. roseus. The significance of this study is to determine the best explants and combination of NAA and BAP for shoot induction of C. roseus. The sterilization procedure will be optimized because contamination in cultures is one of the limiting factors in plant tissue culture of C. roseus.
Keywords: Catharanthus roseus, 6-benzylaminopurine (BA), naphthalene acetic acid (NAA)
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