OA02.17. Medicinal plant tissue culture and its ayurvedic perspective.

PURPOSE: Introduction of Plant tissue culture (PTC) concept to the Ayurveda realm. METHOD: 1. Analysis of principles the plant tissue culture based on the literature review and real wet lab images of tissue culture 2. Analysis of ayurvedic principles which are relevant in the context 3. Logical concept development. RESULT: Plant tissue culture is based on the natural ability of plant cells to grow in to fullfledged organism, called as totipotency. Plant cell can exhibit totipotency only when it is placed in a suitable micro condition where it is supplied with all essential nutrients such as minerals, water, light source, carbon source and air. Two branches of tissue culture a. micropropagation b. in vitro adventitious root development (Sivakumar 2006), are relevant for ayurvedic industry in purview of increasing demand for good quality raw materials and decreasing wild sources of medicinal plants. Ayurvedic concept of Anukta dravya grahana (Reddy 2008; Kusuma and Joshi 2010) describes the need for understanding the properties of an undocumented drug or medicinal plant experimentally before considering it as an ayurvedic drug. Ayurvedic system dravya guna vijnana is for understanding and classification of medicinal plants based on their seven fold properties (Valiathan 2003). The concept of ‘Abhava prathinidhi dravya’ (Padma et al. 2010) explains the situations where original drugs are substituted with substances of similar qualities, which were prescribed in case of several unavailable or rare drugs. The efficacy of medicinal plants or plant part produced through tissue culture has to be determined even though those are botanically and genetically the same. Rasanirdharana method (Dhyani 2008) can be combined efficiently with phytochemical screening for this purpose. CONCLUSION: Plant materials produced through PTC can be ideologically acceptable for ayurvedic industry when principles of plant tissue culture is analysed in detail in the light of certain ayurvedic principles.