In traditional system of medicine, the seeds of Strychnos potatorum Linn. (family: Loganiaceae) are used in the treatment of gonorrhea, leukorrhea leukeorrhea, gastropathy, bronchitis, chronic diarrhea, dysentery, renal and vesicle calculi, diabetes, conjunctivitis, scleritis, ulcers and other eye disease. An attempt has been made to highlight this medicinal seeds through phytochemical and pharmacological study. The present review deals with the phytochemical and pharmacological screening of therapeutic importance from Strychnos potatorum L., an important medicinal plant. This study includes the collective information of different medicinal uses of Strychnos potatorum. The generated data has provided the basis for its wide use as the therapeutant both in the traditional and folk medicines.

Strychnos potatorum: Phytochemical and pharmacological review.

Soil heavy metal pollution is one of the biggest problems around the globe. Phytoremediation has emerged as an eco-friendly, extremely cheap, and highly promising technology for reclamation of degraded land to solve the looming problem of heavy metal pollution. After the research of a few decades, plenty of improvements and advances have been added to the technology. Scientists have investigated the complex mechanisms of metal uptake processes of several plant species and adapted possible strategies to optimize their capacity to improve the technology to solve the problem. In this chapter we have discussed the available advances and adaptations, crucial challenges of the technology, and the future prospects for eliminating the loopholes of the technology to improve the reliability of the technology.

Phytoremediation of heavy metal-contaminated soils: recent advances, challenges, and future prospects

The seed of irmali tree Strychnos potatorum linn which grows wild in the Vindhyan and southern region of India are lenticular in shape and have previously been studied for their coagulation properties in clarifying turbidwater. This property was attributed to the presence of anionic polyelectrolytes having -COOH and free -OH surface groups that are present in the seed protein. However, the metal binding property of these seeds is of recent interest where some bench scale experiments were conducted at NML in order to establish the binding of metal ions from dilute HCl solutions. The seeds collected from the trees of S. potatorum Linn were ground to 0.5 mm size for experimentation purpose. The binding of different transition metals from aqueous solutions by these seeds was studied for Au (I), Ag (I), Cu (I), Cu (II), Co (II), Ni (II), Pb(II), Zn (II), Fe(II) and Fe (III) by shaking 1.0 g of the powdered seed in a 5% v/v HCl solution containing 50.0 ppm 1.0 ppm of the respective metal ion in a 50 ml solution for 5 min. The filtrate obtained after each experiment was analyzed for the respective metal ions and the results obtained are Au (I)=40.80 ppm; Ag (I)=41.10 ppm; Cu (I) =38.00 ppm; Zn (II) = 41.70 ppm; Fe (II) = 42.10 ppm and Fe (III) = 38.20 ppm. On an average the seeds binds 0.5 mg of the respective metals per 1.0 g of the seed. These seeds were fractionated into three different fractions, namely, fraction A, fraction B and fraction C using solvent extraction, distillation and centrifuging techniques in order to investigate what fraction of the seed is responsible in metal ion binding, and the weight percentages of each fraction were found to be 65%, 5% and 30%, respectively. Fraction A is mostly comprising of carbohydrates and some protein, whereas, fraction C is pure protein. Fractions A and C are found to be equally responsible for the binding of metals.

G V K Puvvada

Papers

Studies on the metal binding properties of the seeds of Strychos potatorum linn