The history of global spice trade, major compounds in spices and their chemical structures, and medicinal properties of spices (chemopreventive and anticancerous, antioxidant, as remedy for bird flue, as a bioenhancer, insecticidal, and antimicrobial) are discussed in this chapter. Value addition and development of new products from spices are briefly described. Tabulated data on the following are included: world imports of different spices (2000-2004); main spice-exporting countries by commodity, value and percentage share (2004); and area and production of important spices in the world.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

This chapter covers the morphology, uses, volatile (mace oil, fixed oil, volatile oil, and leaf, flower and pericarp oils) and non-volatile (lignans, sterols, phenolic acids and aromaglycosides) constituents, and medicinal properties (insecticidal, hypolipidaemic, antioxidant, nematicidal, antibacterial, antineoplastic and antifungal) of nutmeg (Myristica fragrans).

Expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from turmeric (Curcuma longa L.) were used for the screening of type and frequency of Class I (hypervariable) simple sequence repeats (SSRs). A total of 231 microsatellite repeats were detected from 12,593 EST sequences of turmeric after redundancy elimination. The average density of Class I SSRs accounts to one SSR per 17.96 kb of EST. Mononucleotides were the most abundant class of microsatellite repeat in turmeric ESTs followed by trinucleotides. A robust set of 17 polymorphic EST-SSRs were developed and used for evaluating 20 turmeric accessions. The number of alleles detected ranged from 3 to 8 per loci. The developed markers were also evaluated in 13 related species of C. longa confirming high rate (100%) of cross species transferability. The polymorphic microsatellite markers generated from this study could be used for genetic diversity analysis and resolving the taxonomic confusion prevailing in the genus.

No abstract