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Frequent climatic changes in conjunction with other extreme environmental factors are known to affect growth, development and productivity of diverse crop plants. Pigeonpea, a major grain legume of the semiarid tropics, endowed with an excellent deep-root system, is known as one of the important drought tolerant crop plants. Cyclin dependent kinases (CDKs) are core cell cycle regulators and play important role in different aspects of plant growth and development. The cyclin-dependent kinase regulatory subunit gene ( ) was isolated from the cDNA library of pigeonpea plants subjected to drought stress. Pigeonpea ( ) gene expression was detected in both the root and leaf tissues of pigeonpea and was upregulated by polyethylene glycol (PEG), mannitol, NaCl and abscisic acid (ABA) treatments. The overexpression of gene in significantly enhanced tolerance of transgenics to drought and salt stresses as evidenced by different physiological parameters. Under stress conditions, transgenics showed higher biomass, decreased rate of water loss, decreased MDA levels, higher free proline contents, and glutathione levels. Moreover, under stress conditions transgenics exhibited lower stomatal conductance, lower transpiration, and higher photosynthetic rates. However, under normal conditions, -transgenics displayed decreased plant growth rate, increased cell size and decreased stomatal number compared to those of wild-type plants. Real-time polymerase chain reaction revealed that CKS could regulate the expression of both ABA-dependent and ABA-independent genes associated with abiotic stress tolerance as well as plant growth and development. As such, the seems promising and might serve as a potential candidate gene for enhancing the abiotic stress tolerance of crop plants.

Andrographis paniculata is an important medicinal plant containing various bioactive terpenoids and flavonoids. Despite its importance in herbal medicine, no ready-to-use transcript sequence information of this plant is made available in the public data base, this study mainly deals with the sequencing of RNA from A. paniculata leaf using Illumina HiSeq™ 2000 platform followed by the de novo transcriptome assembly. A total of 189.22 million high quality paired reads were generated and 1,70,724 transcripts were predicted in the primary assembly. Secondary assembly generated a transcriptome size of ~88 Mb with 83,800 clustered transcripts. Based on the similarity searches against plant non-redundant protein database, gene ontology, and eukaryotic orthologous groups, 49,363 transcripts were annotated constituting upto 58.91% of the identified unigenes. Annotation of transcripts-using kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes database-revealed 5606 transcripts plausibly involved in 140 pathways including biosynthesis of terpenoids and other secondary metabolites. Transcription factor analysis showed 6767 unique transcripts belonging to 97 different transcription factor families. A total number of 124 CYP450 transcripts belonging to seven divergent clans have been identified. Transcriptome revealed 146 different transcripts coding for enzymes involved in the biosynthesis of terpenoids of which 35 contained terpene synthase motifs. This study also revealed 32,341 simple sequence repeats (SSRs) in 23,168 transcripts. Assembled sequences of transcriptome of A. paniculata generated in this study are made available, for the first time, in the TSA database, which provides useful information for functional and comparative genomic analysis besides identification of key enzymes involved in the various pathways of secondary metabolism.

To establish a standard reference for bioactivity of widely used anticancer compounds that might be useful for meaningful interpretation of the cell viability data generated for novel synthetic derivatives. Meta-analysis of published IC50 values was carried out for commonly used anticancer compounds and cell viability experiments were performed to validate the role of certain factors in drug activity. Variability in the published IC50 values was demonstrated. Based on median IC50 values derived from pooled published data, cell lines were classified as either sensitive or resistant. Further, factors that influence IC50 values were discussed, thus encouraging researchers to devise more rational experimental approaches to enhance the success rate in later stages of drug development.