EFFICIENT GENOMIC DNA EXTRACTION AND MOLECULAR ANALYSIS OF MEDICINALLY RICH VALERIANA JATAMANSI DRY ROOTS

One of the major problems faced by the pharmaceutical industry is to maintain the quality and efficacy of herbal drugs due to the lack of purity of herbal raw materials. Furthermore, using traditional identification methods to identify the correct plant part needed for the preparation of herbal medicine can be difficult. Creating a novel system to assess the quality of a medicinal herb and to discriminate adulterants from authentic raw material is essential. There is a lot of confusion regarding nomenclature and originality of Valerian available in the market. The objective of the present work is to develop a molecular tool for accurate identification of dry root samples. The isolation of DNA is the first step in developing this technology. The methods employed for extracting DNA from fresh and dried root samples of medicinal plants, however, are time-consuming and yield DNA in lesser quantity and low purity due to the presence of high levels of polysaccharides, phenolics and other secondary metabolites in these samples. In this study, an easy and rapid protocol to extract genomic DNA from the fresh and dry roots of Indian Valerian has been discussed. The method involves a modified CTAB procedure of Doyle and Doyle (1990). The DNA obtained through this method is highly pure and proves to be good for polymerase chain reaction (PCR) with random primers.