#pharmacy #pharmacognosy #phytochemistry #drsiddhiupadhyay #sigmainstituteofpharmacy #conservationofmedicinalplants

1. Conservation
of
Medicinal Plants
DR. SIDDHI UPADHYAY
H.O.D. & ASSOCIATE
PROFESSOR
Dept. of pharmacognosy and
phytochemistry
SIGMA INSTITUTE OF
PHARMACY

2. INTRODUCTION
 India has one of the richest plant medical
cultures in the world.
 Herbal plants that have been used by
Ayurveda, siddha, unani & Tibetan system of
health care face an uncertain future due to
over exploitation.
 Conservation is about preventing damage and
loss to our cultural heritage

3. CONSERVATION
ACTIVITIES
 Preservation
Research
 Restoration
Advise
 Examination
Treatment
 Documentation
Training and education

4. NEED FOR CONSERVATION –
1/2
 Over one and a half million practitioners of the
Indian systems of medicine, in the oral and
codified streams, use medicinal plants in
preventive, promotive and curative
applications.
 Medicinal plants are potential renewable
natural resources

5. NEED FOR CONSERVATION –
2/2
 Several medicinal plants have been assessed
as endangered, vulnerable and threatened
due to over harvesting in the wild
 While the demand for medicinal plants is
increasing, their survival in their natural
habitats is under growing threat

6. ENDANGERED SPECIES –
1/2
 ENDANGERED: Species with low population
number that are in considerable danger of
becoming extinct e.g. Dioscorea deltoida
 CRITICALLY ENDANGERED: when a
species is facing an extremely high risk of
extinction in wild in the immediate future
e.g. Concinium fenestratum

7. ENDANGERED SPECIES –
2/2
 RARE SPECIES: Species with small population
restricted geographically with localised
habitats. They are not in immediate danger of
extinction e.g. Saraca indica
 VULNERABLE: Species are under threat of or
actually declining in number. e.g. Embelia ribes
beum
 EXTINCT: Species which cannot be found in areas
where they recently been inhabited e.g. Drosera
indica

8. CAUSES OF EXTINCTION
FOREST DEPLETION DUE TO: ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS:
Direct human pressure, Cattle
ranching
Pollution
Fuel wood consumption
Disturbances in the
ecological system
&diversity
Acid rain, Illegal export &trade
Commercial logging in forests Green house effect, Agricultural
intensification

9. INDIAN ENDANGERED MEDICINAL
PLANTS
 Artocarpus hirsutus (Moraceae)
 Baliospermum montanum (Euphorbiaceae)
 Calophyllum apetalum (Elusiaceae)
 Dipterocarpus indicus (Dipterocarpaceae)
 Woodfordia fruticosa
 Rauwolfia serpentina
 Garcinia (Clusiaceae)
 Ephedra gerardiana (Ephedraceae)

10. Conservation strategies for medicinal plants

11. In situ conservation Introduction – 1/4
 In situ or on site conservation involves
maintaining genetic resources in their natural
habitats i.e., within the ecosystem to which it
is adapted, whether as wild or crop cultivar in
farmer's field as components of the traditional
agricultural systems

12. In situ conservation Introduction – 2/4
 The key operational steps for establishing in situ gene
banks for conservation of prioritized medicinal plants
include:
 Threat assessment
 Establishment of a network of medicinal plant forest
reserves
 Involving local stakeholders
 Botanical, ecological, trade and ethno-medical surveys
 Assessing intraspecific variability of prioritized species
 Designing species recovery programmes
 Establishment of a medicinal plant seed center etc.

13. In situ conservation Introduction – 3/4
 Conclusively, no in situ conservation project
can succeed without the complete
cooperation and involvement of local people

14. In situ conservation Introduction – 4/4
 Different techniques of In situ conservation:
1. The Parks Department should prepare a policy at national level on the
conservation and utilization of medicinal plants in protected areas
2. The Parks Department should assess the extent to which the protected
areas system covers the medicinal plants of the country. It should then
create new protected areas and extend existing ones to ensure that all the
medicinal plants of the country are conserved
3. The Parks Department should devise economic and social incentives for
maintaining natural habitats and wild species
4. Park managers should ensure that the conservation and exploitation of
medicinal plants are incorporated into site management plans
5. Park managers should ensure that the conservation and exploitation of
medicinal plants are incorporated into site management plans
6. Species that are heavily depleted by over-collection should be re-introduced
into areas where they once grew wild

15. The Parks Department should prepare a policy at
national level on the conservation and utilization of
medicinal plants in protected areas
 The policy should include:
 -Identifying which of the protected areas are most important for
medicinal plants;
 -Targets and techniques for recording and monitoring medicinal
plants in protected areas;
 -Techniques and procedures for collection of medicinal plants
within protected areas; -A legal mechanism to ensure that
benefits reach local people
 -Training of park managers about medicinal plants, including
their uses;
 -Public education about medicinal plants in protected areas

16.  Protected areas that are important sites for wild medicinal
plants are good sites for continuing research programmes
on genetic improvement of medicinal plants.
 Linkage with local universities and botanic gardens can
often be extremely useful.
 The policy should be at national level, but should be
implemented by individual park managers.
 It should be prepared in consultation with conservation
and development groups, and other relevant sectors, in
particular the Ministry of Health.

17. The Parks Department should assess the extent to which the
protected areas system covers the medicinal plants of the
country. It should then create new protected areas and extend
existing ones to ensure that all the medicinal plants of the
country are conserved
 The starting point for this process is an up-to-date map of
the vegetation cover of the country.
 Images from satellites provide a way to keep this
information up-to-date
 Also needed are the data on individual species
 These data will most likely be held by national herbaria
and botany departments, but ideally should be brought
together in one place and entered in a centralized
database, to support planning efforts at the national level.

18.  Once the habitat of a species has been
identified, botanists can predict where that
species might occur, in addition to those
places where it has already been found.
 This enables maps to be prepared
highlighting the key areas for medicinal
plants.

19.  Species which only occur in areas of natural
vegetation - as opposed to species in
disturbed habitats (such as Catharanthus
roseus, Rosy Periwinckle, which, outside its
natural habitat, is a roadside weed) should be
given priority.
 Of these species, the endemics - plants
confined to the country should receive
particular attention

20.  Park planners can then superimpose maps of:
species distributions
surviving vegetation
existing protected areas

21.  This will show the extent to which the protected area
system covers the medicinal plants of the country, and
where the principal gaps in the system occur.
 Although this can be done manually, using maps drawn
on transparent plastic, it is better done nowadays on
computers, using the technology of Geographical
Information Systems (GIS)

22. The Parks Department should devise economic and
social incentives for maintaining natural habitats and
wild species
 Modern conservation planners try to reduce the loss of
living resources by showing how conserving
biodiversity helps to safeguard the benefits that people
derive from wild species.
 Medicinal plants are only one of these benefits and
should be treated together with other benefits, such as
protecting relatives of food crops and maintaining
supplies of fresh water

23.  Park managers should ensure that the some of the
benefits of conserving medicinal plants accrue to local
people.
 In the past, protected areas tended to exclude local
people, in some cases even from their traditional lands
and practices, but this is now seen as a mistake.
 Large protected areas will only survive if they have the
support of the people who live nearby.

24.  Thus conservation planners try to ensure not
only that local people do not lose out from the
the establishment of a protected area but also
that they actually benefit

25. Park managers should ensure that the conservation
and exploitation of medicinal plants are incorporated
into site management plans
 In some areas, it may be appropriate to allow
local people to collect limited amounts of
medicinal plants in protected areas for their
own use.
 This can improve public relations for the park,
and may help to discourage illegal and
damaging activities.

26.  But it should only be permitted to levels that are
sustainable, and a percentage of the profits earned
from the medicinal plants should be returned to
improving management of the protected areas.
 Where a commercial company makes use of plants
from the protected area, arrangements should be made
to ensure that the industry contributes to local needs -
of both park and people

27.  In other areas, a policy of absolute protection, except
for removal of small amounts of propagating material,
may be appropriate.
 The pharmacologically active ingredients in medicinal
plants may vary within the same species, depending on
factors such as soil chemistry, type of vegetation, and
presence of insect predators.
 For this reason, to conserve the full genetic diversity of
the species, a range of wild populations of each
medicinal plant should be maintained, even when the
main source of supply is cultivation.

28.  Park departments can also help encourage
the process of cultivating the medicinal plants.
 They can provide seeds and saplings for local
people, and can even set up small medicinal
plant nurseries in suitable areas

29. Species that are heavily depleted by over-collection
should be re-introduced into areas where they once
grew wild
 In appropriate cases, species which have
become extinct in nature may be re-
introduced either to their original localities or if
that no longer exists into a similar habitat.
 Guidelines for such re-introductions are being
prepared by Botanic Gardens Conservation
International and IUCN's Species Survival
Commission

30. Ex situ conservation Introduction–
1/3
 Ex situ conservation, involves conservation of
biodiversity outside the native or natural habitat where
the genetic variation is maintained away from its
original location
 Ex situ genetic conservation fulfills the requirement of
present or future economic, social and environmental
needs.
 Conservation also includes propagation and
assessment of molecular diversity

31. Ex situ conservation Introduction– 2/3
 Conservation of medicinal plants include a
combination of methods, depending on factors such
as:
Geographic sites
Biological characteristics of plants
Available infrastructure
Network having an access to different
geographical areas, human resources and number of
accessions in a given collection

32. Ex situ conservation Introduction– 3/3
 Different techniques of Ex situ conservation:
1. In vitro regeneration
2. Cryobanks for conservation
3. Low temperature germplasm storage
4. Seed storage module

33. In vitro regeneration – 1/7
 In vitro regeneration include:
Plant/Explant growth
Maintenance under disease free condition
Retention of regenerative potential,
genetic stability
Ensuring that there is no damage to the
live material.

34. In vitro regeneration – 2/7
 Its advantages over the in vivo method:
 Great savings in storage space and time
 Possibility of maintaining species for which
seed preservation is impossible or unsuitable
and
 Disease-free transport and exchange of
germplasm, since cultures are maintained
under phytosanitary conditions

35. In vitro regeneration – 3/7
 In vitro multiplication protocols for fast propagation of a
number of red listed medicinal, aromatic and
recalcitrant taxa that are difficult to propagate through
conventional means would be very useful.
 Usually, shoot tips or axillary buds are cultured on a
nutrient medium containing (i) high levels of cytokinins
or (ii) low concentrations of auxin coupled with high-
cytokinin content

36. In vitro regeneration – 4/7
 Somatic embryos, or even axillary buds are
encapsulated in hydrosoluble gels to form 'artificial
seeds' and have used for rapid propagation of the
species.
 Even more important is the reintroduction of in vitro
raised material into their natural habitat and monitoring
its performance over several years, to ensure fidelity
with respect to active compounds or the marker
chemical, vis-a-vis the parents

37. In vitro regeneration – 5/7
 The cell culture process itself can result in genetic
changes in the regenerated plants.
 These heritable genetic changes are termed as
somaclonal variation.
 The presence of an undifferentiated callus phase in the
regeneration protocol enhances the chances for
somaclonal variation among the regenerated plants.
 These variations can result from simple DNA sequence
differences.

38. In vitro regeneration – 6/7
 The cell environment appears to induce a
very high frequency of such mutations.
 Other types of changes that frequently occur
in regenerated plants could be due to
chromosomal, structural and number changes
due to rearrangements in multi-gene families,
gene silencing due to changes in DNA
methylation, action of jumping genes etc

39. In vitro regeneration – 7/7
 Hence, it is necessary to avoid the use of
auxin and auxin like substances in the
meristem multiplication protocols.
 It is also mandatory to check the fidelity of the
plants multiplied from the meristem cultures
and plants multiplied from cryo preserved
meristems by using RAPD markers.

40. Cryobanks for conservation – 1/3
 Cryopreservation of plant cells and meristems is an
important tool for longterm storage of germplasm or
experimental material without genetic alteration using a
minimum space and maintenance.
 The development of methods to store apical meristems
in liquid nitrogen successfully is needed to aid in the
conservation of genetic resources.
 Cryobanks are basically meant for storage of
germplasm.

41. Cryobanks for conservation – 2/3
 For long term preservation, cryogenic storage at ultra
low temperatures under liquid nitrogen (- 150 to -
196°C) is the method of choice.
 Relatively new to plants, cryopreservation has followed
advances made in the mammalian systems is
achieved either through slow cooling or vitrification.
 Encapsulation/dehydration is another new technique
that offers practical advantages.

42. Cryobanks for conservation – 3/3
 It is based on the technology originally developed for
production of synthetic seeds, i.e., somatic embryos
encapsulated in a hydrosoluble gel.
 Several types of in-vitro raised materials such as
meristems/shoot tips, cell suspensions, protoplasts,
somatic embryos and pollen embryos of medicinal and
aromatic species have been studied from the
cryopreservation perspective

43. Low temperature germplasm storage – 1/4
 Preservation by under-cooling has recently been applied
to plant tissue cultures.
 The objective of this approach is to maintain tissues at
low temperatures (-10 to -20 °C) but in the absence of
ice crystallization.
 The plant tissues are immersed in immiscible oil and the
emulsion thus formed can be under cooled to relatively
low temperatures thereby circumventing ice formation,
one of the most injurious consequences of low
temperature storage.

44. Low temperature germplasm storage – 2/4
 Although good recovery has been reported in certain
species, this has only been achieved using a
temperature of -10° C and for relatively short storage
periods (6-48 hours)
 Recently, vitrification, simplified freezing, and
encapsulation-dehydration methods have been used for
storage of valuable germplasm.
 These new procedures may replace freeze-induced cell
dehydration by removal of all or of a major part of
freezable water from cells at room temperature or at 0°
C.

45. Low temperature germplasm storage – 3/4
 In the encapsulationdehydration technique, extraction of
water results in progressive osmotic dehydration,
additional loss of water is obtained by evaporation and
the subsequent increase of sucrose concentration in the
beads.
 In the technique, preculturing encapsulated meristems in
medium enriched with sucrose before dehydration
induces resistance to dehydration and deep-freezing.

46. Low temperature germplasm storage – 4/4
 The vitrification procedure for cryopreserving
meristems involves preculture and/or loading
and osmotic dehydration by short exposure of
meristems to highly concentrated mixture of
cryoprotectants.
 The encapsulation-dehydration technique is
easy to handle and alleviates dehydration
process

47. Seed storage module – 1/2
 Usually seeds, being natural parenting structures of
plants, represent a condition of suspended animation of
embryos, and are best suited for storage.
 By suitably altering their moisture content (5-8%), they
can be maintained for relatively long periods at low
temperatures (-18 °C or lower).
 However, in several species, rhizome/bulb or some
other vegetative part may be the site of storage of
active ingredients, and often, such species do not set
seed.

48. Seed storage module – 2/2
 If seeds set, they may be sterile or recalcitrant i.e.,
intolerant of reduction in moisture or temperature, or,
otherwise unsuitable for storage.
 It is now possible to store materials other than seed,
such as pollen or clones obtained from elite
genotypes/cell lines with special attributes, in-vitro
raised tissues/organs, or, genetically transformed
material

49. Constraints for conservation – 1/2
 IUCN Red Data book lists 34,000 plants with
endangered status.
 Botanical Garden Conservation International (BGCI)
2000 database indicates that there are about 1846
botanic gardens.
 In-order to put efforts for ex-situ conservation; these
botanical gardens have to cultivate several hundreds of
endangered, rare and vulnerable plant species, which
requires elaborate facilities and extraordinary efforts

50. Constraints for conservation – 2/2
 Therefore, biologists feel that the ex situ
conservation should be considered as a
complimentary measure of in situ
conservation for holistic strengthening of
conservation

51. THANK YOU !!!
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