Department of Biotechnology

About: Department of Biotechnology is a government organization based out in New Delhi, India. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Silver nanoparticle. The organization has 4800 authors who have published 5033 publications receiving 82022 citations.

Transcriptomic and metabolomic shifts in rice roots in response to Cr (VI) stress.

Abstract: Widespread use of chromium (Cr) contaminated fields due to careless and inappropriate management practices of effluent discharge, mostly from industries related to metallurgy, electroplating, production of paints and pigments, tanning, and wood preservation elevates its concentration in surface soil and eventually into rice plants and grains In spite of many previous studies having been conducted on the effects of chromium stress, the precise molecular mechanisms related to both the effects of chromium phytotoxicity, the defense reactions of plants against chromium exposure as well as translocation and accumulation in rice remain poorly understood Detailed analysis of genome-wide transcriptome profiling in rice root is reported here, following Cr-plant interaction Such studies are important for the identification of genes responsible for tolerance, accumulation and defense response in plants with respect to Cr stress Rice root metabolome analysis was also carried out to relate differential transcriptome data to biological processes affected by Cr (VI) stress in rice To check whether the Cr-specific motifs were indeed significantly over represented in the promoter regions of Cr-responsive genes, occurrence of these motifs in whole genome sequence was carried out In the background of whole genome, the lift value for these 14 and 13 motifs was significantly high in the test dataset Though no functional role has been assigned to any of the motifs, but all of these are present as promoter motifs in the Database of orthologus promoters These findings clearly suggest that a complex network of regulatory pathways modulates Cr-response of rice The integrated matrix of both transcriptome and metabolome data after suitable normalization and initial calculations provided us a visual picture of the correlations between components Predominance of different motifs in the subsets of genes suggests the involvement of motif-specific transcription modulating proteins in Cr stress response of rice

Antioxidant activity of polyphenolic compounds extracted from defatted raw and dry heated Tamarindus indica seed coat

Abstract: The antioxidative properties and total phenolic contents of raw and dry heated seed coat of Tamarindus indica were examined. The raw and dry heated samples were extracted with methanol followed by 70% acetone, after treating with petroleum ether, solvents were removed using rotary vacuum evaporator and the extracts which contain residual moisture were freeze-dried, respectively. Methanol extracts for both raw and dry heated seed coat samples contained higher level of total phenolics and tannins than the aqueous acetone extracts. The extracts were screened for their potential antioxidant activities using such as O 2 − , OH , α , α -diphenyl- β -picrylhydrazyl (DPPH ), ABTS + , FRAP and linoleic acid emulsion model systems. At different concentration of respective solvent extracts, the maximum level of superoxide anion radical scavenging activity (79–85%) was observed at 200 μg of both the raw and dry heated seed coat extracts in the reaction mixture. The DPPH radical and ABTS cation radical scavenging activities were well proved with the ferric reducing antioxidant capacity of the extracts. Interestingly, among the extracts, methanol and aqueous acetone extracts of dry heated sample showed the highest hydroxyl radical scavenging activity of 56.6 and 45.7%, respectively. All extracts, exhibited good antioxidant activity (64.5–71.7%) against the linoleic acid emulsion system and the values were lower and higher than the synthetic antioxdiant, BHA and ascorbic acid, respectively.