A comparative study of phytohaemagglutinin and extract of Phaseolus vulgaris seeds by characterization and cytogenetics.

Phytohaemagglutinin (PHA) is a lectin obtained from Phaseolus vulgaris (red kidney beans), that acts as a mitogen in human leucocyte culture and is commercially available from Gibco. This PHA (Gibco) was found to be very expensive, hence other inexpensive sources that can be used in all kinds of cytogenetics labs (rich and poor), were attempted. One such successful attempt was PHA extract from seeds of P.vulgaris. This paper details the methodology of extraction and application of PHA from seeds of P.vulgaris. Attempts has been made to identify the chemical and physical properties of the products in the extract, analyzed by various spectroscopic and analytical techniques. The analysis clearly indicates that the product from Phaseolus seeds extract was found to be similar to the commercially available PHA (Gibco) in the cytogenetic study of human leucocyte cultures. The present study enforces the possible utility of the plant extract directly for human leucocyte cultures.

Spectroscopic and in silico evaluation of interaction of DNA with six anthraquinone derivatives.

Anthraquinones consist of several hundreds of derivatives that differ in the nature and positions of substituent groups which are known to have several biological activities including antitumor properties. Interaction of molecules with DNA persists to be an extremely vital parameter while endeavouring to formulate therapeutics. In this study, few anthraquinone derivatives such as 1,2-dihydroxyanthraquinone (alizarin), 1,4-dihydroxyanthraquinone (quinizarin), 1,8-dihydroxyanthraquinone (danthron), 1,2,4-trihydroxyanthraquinone (purpurin), 1,4-diaminoanthraquinone, and 1-methylaminoanthraquinone were analyzed for its possible interaction with calf-thymus DNA through spectroscopy and in silico analysis. Our UV spectroscopic results indicate that all selected anthraquinones interact with DNA probably by external binding. Molar extinction coefficient has been calculated for chosen six anthraquinones. FT-IR results suggest that significant shifts of peaks as well as disappearance of certain characteristic peaks were indicators of the plausible interaction going on due to dye-DNA adduct formation. Among the six dyes used, purpurin showed better results and indicates the relatively strong binding affinity with DNA. Our molecular modeling results also show that purpurin has comparatively higher DNA interaction with a score of -6.18 compared with the ethidium bromide of -5.02 and intercalate the DNA.