ABOUT DATABASE

Medicinal plants are of great importance not only for their “green chemistry” but primarily because of their potential “phytomedicinal” properties used in treating/preventing human diseases of diverse nature. Considering the importance and associated commercial implication, huge interests have been generated in the recent years with regards to its phytochemistry (identification of bio-active compounds) and phamacognosy (bio-assay of constituents, mode of action). However, despite such important achievements, very little information is available in the area of genomic resources (genes, ESTs, molecular markers) of medicinal plants Tinospora cordifolia and Andrographis paniculata.

To boost research in the area of genomics, we have assembled in-house generated de novo genome-wide transcripts of Tinospora cordifolia and Andrographis paniculata. Both medicinal plants are of immense value as they are being applied in treating diverse human diseases due to its bio-active constituents.  The transcripts were assembled from NGS (454 GS-FLX) generated sequences. The NCBI database enlists ~5K ESTs of Tinospora whereas for Andrographis the ESTs number stood at 708.  However, in our endeavour we have generated ~25K and ~22K transcripts each for Tinospora cordifolia and Andrographis paniculata, respectively. The transcripts of both the medicinal plants will serve as ‘spring-board’ for expediting research in the area of gene discovery, candidate gene determination, marker development etc. Moreover, such research effort will lead to better understanding of biosynthetic genes responsible for synthesis of bio-active compounds in such medicinal plants and also provide useful information regarding markers linked to inherent chemo-diversity, if any. Also, such effort will help in devising strategy to conserve germplasm of such medicinal plants as many of them thrive in wild condition. 

To demonstrate the efficacy of our transcript datasets of both Tinospora cordifolia and Andrographis paniculata, we successfully validated novel microsatellite/SSR markers designed from sequence information of assembled transcripts.