ABSTRACT
Talinum Triangulare (Family: Portulacaceae) is an herbaceous perennial plant widely grown in tropical regions as a leaf vegetable with a blood-glucose-lowering effect, but its mechanism of action are still unknown. Here we report a hypoglycemic activity of Methanolic Extract of Talinum Triangulare Leaf (METTL) in healthy, glucose loaded and Streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetic rats. Animals either healthy or STZ-induced diabetic show significantly lowered blood glucose levels after 2 weeks of METTL treatment (250 mg/kg), it significantly reduced blood glucose levels compared with that in diabetic control rats. Additionally, the increase in blood glucose levels after administration of glucose (1.2 g/kg) in normal rats is significantly decreased and the oral glucose tolerance (OGTT) of STZ-induced diabetic rats is largely improved by METTL treatment. However, co-administration of METTL with glipizide, an oral hypoglycemic drug, it produces synergistic effect. We conclude that METTL has a significant anti hyperglycemic effect. Continuous glucose monitoring is needed in diabetic patients.
ABSTRACT
To decipher the genes associated with drought stress response and to identify novel genes in rice, we utilized 1540 high-quality expressed sequence tags (ESTs) for functional annotation and mapping to rice genomic sequences. These ESTs were generated earlier by 3'-end single-pass sequencing of 2000 cDNA clones from normalized cDNA libraries constructed form drought-stressed seedlings of an indica rice. A rice UniGene set of 1025 transcripts was constructed from this collection through the BLASTN algorithm. Putative functions of 559 nonredundant ESTs were identified by BLAST similarity search against public databases. Putative functions were assigned at a stringency E value of 10(-6) in BLASTN and BLASTX algorithms. To understand the gene structure and function further, we have utilized the publicly available finished and unfinished rice BAC/PAC (BAC, bacterial artificial chromosome; PAC, P1 artificial chromosome) sequences for similarity search using the BLASTN algorithm. Further, 603 nonredundant ESTs have been mapped to BAC/PAC clones. BAC clones were assigned by a homology of above 95% identity along 90% of EST sequence length in the aligned region. In all, 700 ESTs showed rice EST hits in GenBank. Of the 325 novel ESTs, 128 were localized to BAC clones. In addition, 127 ESTs with identified putative functions but with no homology in IRGSP (International Rice Genome Sequencing Program) BAC/PAC sequences were mapped to the Chinese WGS (whole genome shotgun contigs) draft sequence of the rice genome. Functional annotation uncovered about a hundred candidate ESTs associated with abiotic stress in rice and Arabidopsis that were previously reported based on microarray analysis and other studies. This study is a major effort in identifying genes associated with drought stress response and will serve as a resource to rice geneticists and molecular biologists.