Levels of opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan’s provinces and districts rise and fall depending on a range of factors that are not well understood. Declines in cultivation are often attributed to the political commitment of the provincial and local authorities and the role of information campaigns, while the underlying power and economic dynamics that drive these changes receive little atten...

This article focuses on the uses of opiates in early modern Scotland an effort to trace neglected story how poppy-based substances were used this period across British Isles. It explores their history medical practices, examining sources as varied household recipes, apothecaries’ invoices, and family correspondence surgeons alongside treatises publications seventeenth eighteenth centuries. Cons...

medicinal use of the opium poppy (papaver somniferum l) has ancient history, but the isolation of morphine was not described until the early nineteenth century. morphine is the most important alkaloid of opium poppy in the last 50 years. in the morphine pathway has been reported to generate morphine in this species, codm has a crucial role as the gene coding the enzyme responsible for demethyla...

Opium poppy (Papaver somniferum L.) produces a large variety of isoquinoline alkaloids. The aim of this investigation is to understand the regulation of biosynthesis and the ecological function of the alkaloids in the plant. Agrobacterium-mediated transformations of opium poppy were used to introduce the berberine bridge enzyme cDNA bbe 1 in the antisense orientation into seedling explants. Aft...

more than 12,000 alkaloids are known in plants, mostly used as medicine with a world market value of about 4 billion us$. opium poppy, papaver somniferum, is the most important economic source of morphinane alkaloids such as morphine, codeine, thebaine, narcotine and papaverine that are exploited by the pharmaceutical industry as analgesics, antitussives and anti-spasmodics. with regard to incr...

Three key benzylisoquinoline alkaloid biosynthetic enzymes, (S)-N-methylcoclaurine-3'-hydroxylase (CYP80B1), berberine bridge enzyme (BBE), and codeinone reductase (COR), were localized in cultured opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) cells by sucrose density gradient fractionation and immunogold labeling. CYP80B1 catalyzes the second to last step in the formation of (S)-reticuline, the last common...

Opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) produces a diverse array of bioactive benzylisoquinoline alkaloids and has emerged as a versatile model system to study plant alkaloid metabolism. The plant is widely cultivated as the only commercial source of the narcotic analgesics morphine and codeine. Variations in plant secondary metabolism as a result of genetic diversity are often associated with perturb...