In Vitro Conservation Protocols for Some Threatened Medicinal-Plant

Abstract

In recent years there has been renewed interest in natural medicines that are obtained from plant parts or plant extracts. Pharmaceutical companies depend largely upon materials procured from naturally occurring stands that are being rapidly depleted. There can be aspects of medicinal plant conservation which plant conservationists can pursue, working largely outside the normal dynamics of people/plant relationships. Experimental approaches used for propagation of medicinal plants through tissue culture can be divided into three broad categories. The most common approach is to isolate organized meristems like shoot tips or axillary buds and induce them to grow into complete plants. This system of propagation is commonly referred to as micropropagation. In the second approach, adventitious shoots are initiated on leaf, root and stem segments or on callus derived from those organs. The third system of propagation involves induction of somatic embryogenesis in cell and callus cultures. It was not until several decades later that the first articles on threatened species were published, but today its rate is increasing as forest fire and a great loss of plant wealth has lead man to a new world of destruction and it seems to be ever increasing. Thus, it is the need of an hour to conserve the natural wealth and plant tissue culture seems to be the best solution.