Naturally occurring and semisynthetic ergot alkaloids play a role in health care or as recreational drugs in Western and indigenous Mexican societies. Evidence is summarized that ergot alkaloids present in Central American Convolvulaceae like Turbina corymbosa, Ipomoea violacea, and Ipomoea asarifolia are colonized by different species of a newly described clavicipitaceous fungal genus named Pe...

Methanolic extracts of diff erent parts of fi ve medicinal plants, Ferula assafoetida L. resin, Grewia asiatica L. leaves, Ipomoea hederacea Jacq. seeds, Lepidium sativum L. seeds and Terminalia chebula Retz. fruits were tested in vitro for their cytotoxic, phytotoxic, insecticidal, nematicidal and anthelmintic activities. Ipomoea hederacea showed very signifi cant phytotoxic and cytotoxic acti...

Free radicals are implicated for more than 80 diseases including Diabetes mellitus, arthritis, cancer, ageing etc. In treatment of theses diseases, antioxidant therapy has gained an utmost importance. Current research is now directed towards finding naturally occurring antioxidant of plant origin. In Indian system of medicine Ipomoea fistulosa is an important medicinal plant. The in-vitro antio...

Human-mediated selection can lead to rapid evolution in very short time scales, and the evolution of herbicide resistance in agricultural weeds is an excellent example of this phenomenon. The common morning glory, Ipomoea purpurea, is resistant to the herbicide glyphosate, but genetic investigations of this trait have been hampered by the lack of genomic resources for this species. Here, we pre...

Tip100 is an Ac-like transposable element that belongs to the hAT superfamily. First discovered in Ipomoea purpurea (common morning glory), it was classified as an autonomous element capable of movement within the genome. As Tip100 data were already available in databases, the sequences of related elements in ten additional species of Ipomoea and five commercial varieties were isolated and anal...

The Dobzhansky-Muller model posits that postzygotic reproductive isolation results from the evolution of incompatible epistatic interactions between species: alleles that function in the genetic background of one species can cause sterility or lethality in the genetic background of another species. Progress in identifying and characterizing factors involved in postzygotic isolation in Drosophil...

Four new and two known ether-soluble resin glycosides were isolated from popular sweet potato (the roots of Ipomoea batatas L. LAM., Kokei 14 go, Convolvulaceae) in Japan. Unlike ester-type dimers, batatins I and II, obtained from other sweet potato (Ipomoea batabas var. batatas), the glycosides were tetra or pentasaccharide monomers in which the sugar moieties are partially acylated by organic...

We have characterized a cDNA clone, IRK1, for a putative receptor kinase from a stigma cDNA library of Ipomoea trifida. IRK1 protein contains an extracellular receptor-like domain and the consensus sequences diagnostic of serine/threonine protein kinase. Both the pattern of gene expression and the results of RFLP analysis indicate that the IRK1 gene is not primarily involved in the self-incompa...

Ipomoea genus is widely distributed in the tropical and subtropical regions of the world. The exploration of genetic diversity is pre-requisite for genome organization in the wild species and the related domesticated ones. Inter-simple Sequence Repeat (ISSR) markers was used to assess the identification of 21 important Ipomoea species and determination of the genetic relationships among these s...

Numerous diseases are associated with oxidative stress caused by free radicals. Current research is directed towards finding naturally-occurring antioxidants of the plant origin. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the in vitro antioxidant activities of Ipomoea pes-caprae extract. 80% ethanol extract of Ipomoea pescaprae was studied in vitro for total antioxidant activity, for scavengi...