Affiliations 

  • 1 Plant Physiology Laboratory, Department of Botany, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Av. Bento Gonçalves, 9500, Porto Alegre, RS, 91501-970, Brazil
  • 2 National Research Council of Canada, 110 Gymnasium Pl., Saskatoon, SK, Canada, S7N 0W9
  • 3 National Research Council of Canada, 110 Gymnasium Pl., Saskatoon, SK, Canada, S7N 0W9. [email protected]
Methods Mol Biol, 2016;1405:43-8.
PMID: 26843164 DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4939-3393-8_5

Abstract

Centella asiatica (L.) Urban (Apiaceae), a small annual plant that grows in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and other parts of Asia, is well-known as a medicinal herb with a long history of therapeutic uses. The bioactive compounds present in C. asiatica leaves include ursane-type triterpene sapogenins and saponins-asiatic acid, madecassic acid, asiaticoside, and madecassoside. Various bioactivities have been shown for these compounds, although most of the steps in the biosynthesis of triterpene saponins, including glycosylation, remain uncharacterized at the molecular level. This chapter describes an approach that integrates partial enzyme purification, proteomics methods, and transcriptomics, with the aim of reducing the number of cDNA candidates encoding for a glucosyltransferase involved in saponin biosynthesis and facilitating the elucidation of the pathway in this medicinal plant.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.