WikiConference India 2011/Submissions/Biowikis for Medicinal plants

Timestamp

05:27, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

Title of the submission

Genetic and chemical fingerprinting of medicinal plants: A Biowiki perspective

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, or presentation)

Workshop

Author of the submission

Prashanth Suravajhala ( Prash)

Contributors: Dan Bolser, Jeff Bizzaro, Saad Murtaza Khan, Arun Gupta, Sundararajan VS and Pritish Varadwaj

E-mail address or username (if username, please confirm email address in Special:Preferences)

prash@bioclues.org

State of your origin (Country, if you are not based in India)

Andhra Pradesh

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)

Bioclues.org and Bioinformatics.org

Personal homepage or blog

http://wiki.bioinformatics.org/prash

Abstract (maximum 500 words)

Characteristics, quantitative and qualitative traits and physical features in the organism are determined by DNA which regulates the production of specific proteins and enzymes through the central dogma of molecular biology, viz. DNA transcripts mRNA translates protein. The fact that the DNA arrangement is unvarying throughout the organism makes the genetic identity of organisms determine the physical features of the organism. It is also likely that based on the particularity of the genotype in an organism, a particular DNA profile can be ascribed to a particular organism. This fingerprint, specific to a certain individual can be used to examine DNA sequences. The idea of fingerprinting has been progressively applied to determine the line of descent of various organisms including microorganisms. Aside, the trait that is defined, genotypic characterization is useful in most plants, as many of them belong to the same genus and species, but show considerable variation between strains. For example, muscadine grape and Chianti wines vary with inferior quality grapes; importantly the medicinal potential in these plants wherein the amounts of active chemicals vary from plant to plant could be ascertained. Also, we could employ this technique to distinguish two proteins/components/parts that are morphologically similar but has inactive chemical within them. As we have the list of prototypes on these, we would like to exploit the aforementioned information to farmers through in silico and laboratory practice through Wikipedia. We have started Biowikis for medicinal plants: http://wiki.bioinformatics.org sometime ago. Such information that is available through Wikis would be very much helpful to scientists as well as the farmers. The wikis shall be updated on a daily basis wherein monthly workshops and seminars will be organized to introduce the how of using them. Furthermore, the traits as described above will be identified across all arid and semi-arid crops through Arabidopsis and Rice proteome studies and will be updated in Wiki from time to time. We have recently established such leaf protein interaction studies in Peanut and Muscadine (See Reference) which we believe would be useful for the scientists in benchmarking the traits for a specific gene and further decrease the laboratory time in picking up only “specific” genes for analyses. This further would be useful to address the farmers in development of new varieties.

Reference: Katam R, Basha SM, Suravajhala P, Pechan T. Analysis of peanut leaf proteome. J Proteome Res. 2010 May 7;9(5):2236-54.

Track (Community/Knowledge/Outreach/Technology)

Knowledge

Will you attend Wikiconference if your submission is not accepted?

Yes please. I would be glad to attend the one. I would be more than privileged if I'm provided with a scholarship as we represent not-for-profit organization.

Slides or further information (optional)