IntroductionSalacia chinensis L. is a medicinally important plant used as herbal medicine in Ayurveda (Ghanam et al., 2016) and different parts of this plant have been extensively used to treat variety of ailments (Sikarwar et al., 2012). Biologically active compounds such as mangiferin, salacinol, kotanalol, phenolic compounds, glycosides and triterpenes have been isolated from the plant (Matsuda et al., 2005). For the treatment of diabetes, the compound Salacinol along with other compounds, present in S. chinensis is increasingly being used (Patwardhan et
Salacia is one of the medicinally valuable genus, distributed throughout tropical areas which include India, Sri Lanka, Southern China and other Southern Asian Countries. The genus Salacia is represented by 21 species in India, among them eight species are recorded from the state of Karnataka in the Southern part of India. Despite its pharmaceutical importance, very little information exists about the genetic diversity of Salacia at molecular level. Hence the present study was carried out to evaluate the genetic among six species of Salacia namely S. chinensis, S. malabarica, S. oblonga, S. macrosperma, S. reticulata and S. gambleana with the help of ISSR marker analysis. Dendrogram and genetic distance were generated adopting Unweighted Paired Group Method with Arithmetic mean (UPGMA) in the NTSYS-pc software. Basic genetic parameters were calculated by analysing the genetic data with Pop gene 1.32 and GenAlEx 6.2 software. The overall polymorphism across the ten primers screened revealed 26 % polymorphism. A 60% polymorphism was scored for the primer UBC 841, whereas, no polymorphism was observed for primer UBC 840 and ISSR 6. The average observed heterozygosity was more than expected heterozygosity. Observed heterozygosity (Ho) ranged from 0.15 (UBC 841) to 0.38 (ISSR 6) with an average of 0.25, whereas expected heterozygosity (He) ranged from 0.10 (UBC 843) to 0.35 (ISSR 6) with an average of 0.23 for Salacia species. The higher heterozygosity pointed towards increased genetic diversity amongst the species. ISSR marker analysis showed high level of inter and intra population genetic differentiation.
The Salacia is a genus of plants in the family Celastraceae belongs to the ma-jor group Angiosperms. Several species in this genus have been used in tradi-tional medicine. Very limited phytochemical studies have been reported so far in Salacia from Western Ghats of Karnataka. Hence the aim of the pre-sent study was to screen the phytochemical compounds and quantitative analysis of mangiferin content in six species of Salacia. Which were found to be adequate to evaluate the raw material and can also be used as reference standards for the quality control/quality assurance purposes. The quantita-tive profiling of phytochemicals were analysed using Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry and the concentration of mangiferin compound present in stem and root samples were quantified using High performance liquid chromatography method. GC-MS analysis revealed the presence of a vast array of phytoconstituents such as fatty acids, saturated hydrocarbons, het-erocyclic compounds associated with different plant parts. HPLC analysis has shown the presence of mangiferin in all the six species of Salacia, whereas S. chinensis root extract showed highest quantity of mangiferin. S. malabarica, S. oblonga and S. gambleana leaf extract contains the important unsaturated fatty acids and vitamin d-alpha tocopherol which have proven to attenuate oxidative stress and having anti-inflammatory effects. It can be noted that S. chinensis and S. oblonga extract contains higher level of poly unsaturated phytochemical compounds. The study identified that S. chinensis and S. ob-longa could be the most promising raw material for anti-diabetic drug formu-lations based on the phytoconstituent and mangiferin content.
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