From ancient times, saffron, the flower of the plant Crocus sativus L., is widely used as a traditional medicine to promote health and fight disease. Crocus sativus is cultivated in different parts of the world such as Greece, Spain and, mainly, Iran. In view of its wide range of medicinal uses, saffron has submitted to extensive phytochemical and biochemical studies and a variety of biological...

Depressive disorders are very common in clinical practice, with approximately 11.3 of all adults afflicted during any a year. Saffron is the world's most expensive spice and apart from its traditional value as a food additive, recent studies indicate several therapeutic effects for saffron. It is used for depression in Persian traditional medicine. Our objective was to compare the efficacy of h...

The identification and quality evaluation of Flos carthami were studied using tunable liquid spectral imaging instrument, to discuss the application range and advantages of spectral imaging technology in Chinese medicine identification and quality control field. The Flos carthami was indentified by extracting the normalized characteristic spectral curves of Flos carthami, Crocus sativus and Den...

Crocus (Crocus sativus L.) is a crop species cultivated for its flowers and, more specifically, for its red stigmas. The flower of crocus is bisexual and sterile, since crocus is a triploid species. Its perianth consists of six petaloid tepals: three tepals in whorl 1 (outer tepals) and three tepals in whorl 2 (inner tepals). The androecium consists of three distinct stamens and the gynoecium c...

As an aromatic and colorful plant of substantive taste, saffron (Crocus sativus L.) owes such properties of matter to growing class of the secondary metabolites derived from the carotenoids, apocarotenoids. Regarding the critical role of microRNAs in secondary metabolic synthesis and the limited number of identified miRNAs in C. sativus, on the other hand, one may see the point how the characte...

Saffron (Crocus sativus L.) is commonly known as world's most expensive spice with rich source of apocarotenoids and possesses magnificent medicinal properties. To understand the molecular basis of apocarotenoid biosynthesis/accumulation, we performed transcriptome sequencing from five different tissues/organs of C. sativus using Illumina platform. After comprehensive optimization of de novo tr...

flavonoids, are a large class of polyphenols, with more than 4000 combinations. they have an antioxidant role in plant photosynthesis and in the human body they optimally act as an antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anticancer and protector of the heart. quercetin is in the flavonol group that is used to fight protection specifically against viruses and cancer cells. in this study, comparison of e...

background and objectives: there is well established the beneficial effects of crocus sativus extract in learning and memory improvement. in the present study the effect of this plant in memory behavioral impairment and forbrain histological damage induced by stz-icv model of alzheimer disease were investigated. materials and methods: this study was conducted at shahed university (tehran) in 20...

objective: asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease of the respiratory airways distinguished by edema and infiltration of inflammatory immune cells. to test our hypothesis about the anti-inflammatory effect of saffron, we examined effects of crocus sativus (c. sativus) extract as a prophylactic anti-inflammatory agent in sensitized rats. materials and methods: to induce experimental asthma, rat...

saffron or crocus sativus l. (c. sativus) has been widely used as a medicinal plant to promote human health, especially in asia. the main components of saffron are crocin, picrocrocin and safranal. the median lethal doses (ld50) of c. sativus are 200 mg/ml and 20.7 g/kg in vitro and in animal studies, respectively. saffron has been suggested to be effective in the treatment of a wide range of d...