ABSTRACT:
Plant tissue culture offers many advantages over intact plants or plant parts collecting from wild for secondary metabolite isolation and their biosynthetic studies because the in vitro cultures can be kept under strictly controlled nutritional and environmental conditions. The uncertainty of changes in climate and soil that will affect the secondary metabolite production can be avoided and conservation of the plant also can be made possible by plant tissue culture. As of now over fifty categories of various secondary metabolites have been found to be produced by plant tissue or cell cultures. Centella asiatica is a perennial, highly sort after plant species used in traditional Indian medicine, herbal drugs and cosmetics. This plant is under threat because of the high anthropogenic pressure due to over exploitation. To help the efficient use and conservation of this species, eleven accessions collected from five natural populations were subjected to estimate their chemical diversity and in vitro systems namely shoot, callus and root cultures were established for a stable and sustainable production of the neurologically active phytochemicals present in them. Qualitative and quantitative estimation of the phytochemicals viz. flavonoids, saponins and specifically asiaticoside in the natural as well as the in vitro culture systems showed that the in vitro culture systems developed are efficient for the production of these compounds as they are present in comparable amount with their natural counterpart.