Azamal Husen

Poisonous plants are used in traditional medicine systems in various healing therapies. They are a rich resource of ingredients used in herbal drug formulations that are also used in the development of synthetic drugs. They are recognized for their antioxidant, anti-inflammation, anti-cancer, and anti-diabetic activities and for many other health benefits. Exploring Poisonous Plants: Medicinal Values, Toxicity Responses, and Therapeutic Uses provides an analysis of the most important poisonous herbs, shrubs, and trees, detailing poisonous plants while demonstrating endorsements for their potential therapeutic values. Features: Presents therapeutic potentials on various poisonous herbs, shrubs, and trees. Provides descriptions of notable toxic compounds and discusses their adverse effects when consumed by animals or people. Gives practical guidance for botanical description, distribution, phytochemical constituents, pharmacological studies, and traditional and other potential uses of selected poisonous plants. This volume in the Exploring Medicinal Plants series is appropriate for scientists, researchers, and students working with poisonous plants, as well as in areas of economic botany, plant biochemistry, biotechnology, pharmacognosy, pharmaceuticals, industrial chemistry, and nanomedicine.

Medicinal Values, Toxicity Responses, and Therapeutic Uses

Exploring Poisonous Plants

In the recent past, threats from climate change and unforeseeable environmental extremes to plant growth and productivity have consistently increased. The climate change-driven effects, especially from unpredictable environmental fluctuations, can result in an increased prevalence of abiotic and biotic stresses in plants. These stresses have slowed down the global yields of crop plants. On the other hand, food security for the rapidly growing human population in a sustainable ecosystem is a major concern of the present-day world. Thus, understanding the core developmental, physiological and molecular aspects that regulate plant growth and productivity in a challenging environment is a pivotal issue to be tackled by the scientific community dealing with sustainable agricultural and horticultural practices. Plants are influenced by the adverse environmental conditions at various levels, their different and diverse responses play a significant role in determining their growth, production and the overall geographical distribution. The chapters in this book focus on the biological mechanisms and fundamental principles that determine how different plant species grow, perform and interact with a challenging environment. This book covers a broad range of topics in plant science, including gene function, molecules, physiology, cell biology and plant ecology, to understand the functioning of plants under harsh environmental conditions. The book elucidates the physiological and molecular mechanisms in different plant species, ecophysiological interactions of plants, interplay between plant roots, arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria, biosensors for monitoring stress, production of secondary metabolites, stress alleviation processes, and more.

Molecular and Functional Aspects

Harsh Environment and Plant Resilience

Altaf Ahmad

Genomics, Transcriptomics, Proteomics and Metabolomics of Crop Plants presents current operational methods applied to model crop plants. Including subcellular organelles, DNA fingerprinting and barcoding, sRNA, gene expression, rhizosphere engineering, marker assisted and 5G breeding, plant-microorganism interactions, stress signaling and responses, the book highlights important factors that are often overlooked and explores the latest research. The book also explores cutting-edge approaches for immediate application in new research such as OMICS, genome-wide transcriptome profiling, bioinformatics and database, DNA fingerprinting and barcoding, sRNA, gene expression, genome editing, diagnostics, rhizosphere engineering, marker assisted and 5G breeding, crop plant-microorganism interactions, stress signaling and responses. Additionally, the book describes opportunities to manipulate crop plants genetic and metabolic systems, while also exploring the related bioethical and biosafety issues. These topics are chosen and covered in detail to fill the gap in this understanding of crop molecular biology. Includes coverage of the latest trends on plants bioinformatics and databases Presents the overall scope of OMIC sciences with rich illustration Provides implementation advice and future challenges

Genomics, Transcriptomics, Proteomics and Metabolomics of Crop Plants

Environmental pollution as a consequence of diverse human activities has become a global concern. Urbanization, mining, industrial revolution, burning of fossil fuels/firewood and poor agricultural practices, in addition to improper dumping of waste products, are largely responsible for the undesirable change in the environment composition. Environmental pollution is mainly classified as air pollution, water pollution, land pollution, noise pollution, thermal pollution, light pollution, and plastic pollution. Nowadays, it has been realized that with the increasing environmental pollution, impurities may accumulate in plants, which are required for basic human uses such as for food, clothing, medicine, and so on. Environmental pollution has tremendous impacts on phenological events, structural patterns, physiological phenomena, biochemical status, and the cellular and molecular features of plants. Exposure to environmental pollution induces acute or chronic injury depending on the pollutant concentration, exposure duration, season and plant species. Moreover, the global rise of greenhouse gases such as carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxides, methane, chlorofluorocarbons and ozone in the atmosphere is among the major threats to the biodiversity. They have also shown visible impacts on life cycles and distribution of various plant species. Anthropogenic activities, including the fossil-fuel combustion in particular, are responsible for steady increases in the atmospheric greenhouse gases concentrations. This phenomenon accelerates the global heating. Studies have suggested that the changes in carbon dioxide concentrations, rainfall and temperature have greatly influenced the plant physiological and metabolic activities including the formation of biologically active ingredients. Taken together, plants interact with pollutants, and cause adverse ecological and economic outcomes. Therefore, plant response to pollutants requires more investigation in terms of damage detection, adaptation, tolerance, and the physiological and molecular responses. The complex interplay among other emerging pollutants, namely, radioisotopes, cell-phone radiation, nanoparticles, nanocomposites, heavy metals etc. and their impact on plant adaptation strategies, and possibility to recover, mitigation, phytoremediation, etc., also needs to be explored. Further, it is necessary to elucidate better the process of the pollutant’s uptake by plant and accumulation in the food chain, and the plant resistance capability against the various kinds of environmental pollutants. In this context, the identification of tolerance mechanisms in plants against pollutants can help in developing eco-friendly technologies, which requires molecular approaches to increase plant tolerance to pollutants, such as plant transformation and genetic modifications. Pollutant-induced overproduction of reactive oxygen species that cause DNA damage and apoptosis-related alterations, has also been examined. They also trigger changes at the levels of transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome, which has been discussed in this book.

Damage Detection, Adaptation, Tolerance, Physiological and Molecular Responses

Plants and their Interaction to Environmental Pollution

Muhammad Iqbal

This book discusses the latest developments in plant-mediated fabrication of metal and metal-oxide nanoparticles, and their characterization by using a variety of modern techniques. It explores in detail the application of nanoparticles in drug delivery, cancer treatment, catalysis, and as antimicrobial agent, antioxidant and the promoter of plant production and protection. Application of these nanoparticles in plant systems has started only recently and information is still scanty about their possible effects on plant growth and development. Accumulation and translocation of nanoparticles in plants, and the consequent growth response and stress modulation are not well understood. Plants exposed to these particles exhibit both positive and negative effects, depending on the concentration, size, and shape of the nanoparticles. The impact on plant growth and yield is often positive at lower concentrations and negative at higher ones. Exposure to some nanoparticles may improve the free-radical scavenging potential and antioxidant enzymatic activities in plants and alter the micro-RNAs expression that regulate the different morphological, physiological and metabolic processes in plant system, leading to improved plant growth and yields. The nanoparticles also carry out genetic reforms by efficient transfer of DNA or complete plastid genome into the respective plant genome due to their miniscule size and improved site-specific penetration. Moreover, controlled application of nanomaterials in the form of nanofertilizer offers a more synchronized nutrient fluidity with the uptake by the plant exposed, ensuring an increased nutrient availability. This book addresses these issues and many more. It covers fabrication of different/specific nanomaterials and their wide-range application in agriculture sector, encompassing the controlled release of nutrients, nutrient-use efficiency, genetic exchange, production of secondary metabolites, defense mechanisms, and the growth and productivity of plants exposed to different manufactured nanomaterials. The role of nanofertilizers and nano-biosensors for improving plant production and protection and the possible toxicities caused by certain nanomaterials, the aspects that are little explored by now, have also been generously elucidated.

Nanomaterials and Plant Potential

Jin-Chul Kim

Madhusudhan Alle

With the start of 2020, the wrath of pandemic challenged the scientific community to develop more advanced drug delivery approaches for biomedical applications, endowing conventional drugs with additional therapeutic benefits and minimum side effects. Although significant advancements have been done in the field of drug delivery, there is a need to focus towards strategizing novel and improved drug delivery systems that should be convenient and cost-effective to the patients, and simultaneously they should also provide financial benefits to pharmaceutical companies. Controlled drug delivery technology offers ample opportunities and scope for improvising the therapeutic efficacy of drugs via optimizing the drug release rate and time. For this endeavour, smart nanomaterials have served as remarkable candidates for biomedical applications, owing to their ground-breaking properties and design. The development of such nanomaterials requires a broad knowledge related to their physio-chemical properties, molecular structure, mechanisms by which the nanomaterials interact with the cells, and methods by which drugs are released at the site of action. This knowledge must also be allied with the knowledge of signaling crosstalk mechanisms that are modulated by the nanomaterial-drugs composite. It can be anticipated that these emerging drug delivery technologies can facilitate the world to successfully encounter such pandemic outbursts in the future in a cost-effective and time-effective manner. The chapters in this book deal with the advanced technologies and approaches that can benefit advanced students, researchers, and industry experts in developing smart and intelligent nanomaterials for future biomedical applications, and development, manufacturing, and commercialization for controlled and targeted drug delivery.

Azamal Husen

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