Multiple chronic conditions (MCCs)
such as diabetes, hypertension,
heart disease, arthritis, asthma, and common respiratory problems
are prevalent in over one-fourth of Americans, and separate drugs
are prescribed to manage each of the diseases. The nutritive crop
seeds loaded with multiple drugs could be a cheap and sustainable
alternative to drugs produced by pharmaceutical companies. Our long-term
goal is to produce chickpea seeds containing comparable dosages of
multiple drugs regularly prescribed for managing MCC. In this work,
we conducted experiments to understand the uptake and translocation
of metformin into the tissues of chickpea to demonstrate the applicability
of LC–HR-ToF-MS in determining metformin concentration, and
to investigate responses of increased dosage of metformin and it’s
accumulation into the chickpea seed. We treated the chickpea plants
with 100 and 500 mg/L metformin chloride and analyzed its concentration
in the leaf, stem, and seeds. We observed that metformin was successfully
uptaken by chickpeas plant and translocated to stem, leaf, and seeds
in both treatments. We also observed that the metformin concentration
is responsive and as high as 349 times increase in seed when the dosage
was increased from 100 to 500 mg/L.
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