Establishment of cell suspension cultures of Azadirachta indica for the production of nimbolide Navinraj S.1, Santhanakrishnan V.P.1,*, Boopathi N. Manikanda1, Balasubramani V.1, Raghu R.2, Rajamani K.3, Vellaikumar S.4 1Department of Plant Biotechnology, Centre for Plant Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, AC & RI, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore-641003, Tamil Nadu, India 2Department of Agricultural Microbiology, AC & RI, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore-641003, Tamil Nadu 3Department of Medicinal & Aromatic Crops, HC & RI, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore-641003, Tamil Nadu, India 4Department of Biotechnology, AC & RI, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Madurai-625104, Tamil Nadu, India *Corresponding author e-mail: santhanakrishnan.vp@tnau.ac.in
Online Published on 14 April, 2022. Abstract The present study aimed to establish an effective cell suspension medium for the production of nimbolide from the callus culture derived from leaf explants of Azadirachta indica. The callus was induced in MS basal medium supplemented with different concentrations of auxins and cytokinins and the highest callusing percentage (93.3%) was obtained in MS basal medium supplemented with 1.0 mgL–1 IBA and 0.5 mgL–1 BAP. The friable calli were transferred to suspension cultures that were prepared with full strength and half strength liquid MS medium with varying concentrations of IBA and BAP. HPLC analysis revealed the presence of nimbolide in all the cell suspension culture and higher content of about 0.04% was measured in half MS medium supplemented with 1.0 mgL−1 IBA and 0.5 mgL−1 BAP. Thus, this study has identified optimum culture conditions that favours higher amount of nimbolide which has several applications both in agriculture and healthcare industry. Top Keywords Azadirachta indica, Callus, Nimbolide, Cell suspension culture, Friable calli. Top |