A transcriptomic approach for exploring the molecular basis for dosha-balancing property-based classification of plants in Ayurveda

In Ayurveda, a healthy body is defined by a balance among the three doshas ( Vata , Pitta , Kapha ) and ailments result due to imbalances among them. It prescribes specific plant parts/tissues collected in a season-specific manner for curing dosha -related imbalances but the plants prescribed for tr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Molecular biology reports 2013-04, Vol.40 (4), p.3255-3262
Main Authors: Shukla, Ashutosh K., Mall, Maneesha, Rai, Santosh K., Singh, Shefali, Nair, Priya, Parashar, Gaurav, Shasany, Ajit K., Singh, Subhash C., Joshi, Vinod K., Khanuja, Suman P. S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism Analysis
Animal Anatomy
Animal Biochemistry
Ayurvedic medicine
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Classification
Complementary Therapies
Databases, Genetic
DNA, Complementary - classification
DNA, Complementary - genetics
DNA, Complementary - isolation & purification
Expressed Sequence Tags
Gene Expression Profiling
Gene Expression Regulation, Plant
Histology
Humans
Hybridization
India
Life Sciences
Medicine, Ayurvedic
Molecular Sequence Data
Morphology
Plant biology
Plants - genetics
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Summary:In Ayurveda, a healthy body is defined by a balance among the three doshas ( Vata , Pitta , Kapha ) and ailments result due to imbalances among them. It prescribes specific plant parts/tissues collected in a season-specific manner for curing dosha -related imbalances but the plants prescribed for treating a particular dosha imbalance belong to taxonomically diverse families and often contain similar classes of phytomolecules, making it difficult to provide a phytochemical validation for any similarity that might exist among them. This exploratory study hypothesised that plants of the same dosha -curing group may have similarity at the transcript level. For proving/disproving the hypothesis, cDNA–AFLP and specific expression subset analysis (SESA) were carried out on the Ayurveda-defined active tissues of four representative plants each of the three dosha -balancing groups. cDNA–AFLP analyses indicated that even though the plants belonging to a particular dosha -group may widely differ at the transcript level, there is a small fraction of transcripts that is monomorphic among their active tissues. SESA (Tester—active tissue cDNA; Driver—cDNA from other major tissue[s]) generated 803 subtractive ESTs from the twelve plants that yielded 150 unigenes upon assembly (of ESTs from each plant separately). Cross-plant EST assembly for plants in the same dosha group also corroborated the results. Although a distinct pattern of transcripts was not observed across all the plants in a particular dosha group, some commonalities were obtained that need further characterization towards searching for the hitherto elusive similarity among plants of the same group.
ISSN:0301-4851
1573-4978
DOI:10.1007/s11033-012-2400-7