Genome and Metabolomic based Approaches to Authenticate Swerita Chirata from its Adulterants and their Comparative Evaluation against Hypoxia Induced Oxidative Stress in Rats

Abstract

The plant based drugs plays a vital role in healthcare system in developing as well as developed countries and herbal medicines are considered comparably safe. The adulteration and substitution of herbal drugs is the major problem causing threat to the herbal drug industry and to the research on commercial natural products. Swertia chirata of family Gentianaceae is widely used in many traditional systems of medicines because of its immense pharmacological properties. However, high market value and similar morphological characteristics of Swertia species, many adulterants of S. chirata are available in the market which goes by the name of chirata. newlineThere are no standard method or global standard protocols are available presently to check adulteration and to ascertain plant species or plant parts used in herbal medicines in general and that of S. chirata in particular. So in current investigation we have made an attempt to develop a method of S. chirata identification based on DNA bar coding a recently used tool for species identification as well as chemical profiling. Since no comparative study of chemical profiles and medicinal activities of the adulterant species S. chirata has been performed so for. So In this investigation we have conducted a comparative metabolomics based profiling of S. chirata and its adulterants newlineDifferential identification of four adulterant species along with nine Swertia species were examined by using six DNA candidate barcodes (rbcL, matK, atpF-H, rpoB, ITS, psbK-I). The results suggest that inter specific divergence was high than intra specific divergence in case of psbK-I when compared to rest of the regions. Also, the single nucleotide polymorphism obtained in psbK-I region and the Neighbor-joining tree obtained by Kimura 2-parameter model, method further supported the potential of the region to be used as barcode to identify S. chirata and differentiate it from most commonly used adulterants. So it is concluded that barcode psbk-I can be used proficiently to identify S. chirat