Abstract
Catharanthus roseus (family Apocynaceae) is grown as an ornamental plant in many countries, although it originated from Madagascar. It is also known as Madagascar periwinkle or Cape periwinkle. This plant was used traditionally as a crude medicine for diabetes and other ailments. It has also been used as a substitute for hops in brewing beer. Now, however, C. roseus is most useful as a source of various alkaloids; approximately 90 indole alkaloids have been isolated from it, the most valuable being the dimeric alkaloids vinblastine and vincristine, which show antitumor activity. They are very similar in chemical structure, but their activity spectra and side effects are extremely different: vinblastine is effective against Hodgkin’s disease, choriocarcinoma, and the like, while vincristine is mainly employed to treat childhood acute leukemia. Vinblastin shows bone marrow toxicity, whereas vincristine is toxic to the nervous system. Due to the very low yields of these dimeric indole alkaloids in the plant (approx. 0.0005%), attempts have been made to produce alkaloid and other secondary metabolites in cell and tissue cultures. General reviews of work in this field have been published (see Heijden et al. 1989; David and Tempé 1993; Hirata et al. 1994; Sakurai and Fujioka 1996).
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Yokoyama, M., Inomata, S. (1998). Catharanthus roseus (Periwinkle): In Vitro Culture, and High-Level Production of Arbutin by Biotransformation. In: Bajaj, Y.P.S. (eds) Medicinal and Aromatic Plants X. Biotechnology in Agriculture and Forestry, vol 41. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-58833-4_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-58833-4_5
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