Leucas aspera is a
medicinal plant well known for its traditional uses such as antipyretic and
insecticide. It is commonly known as Thumbai or Thumba and distributed
throughout India from the Himalayas down to Srilanka. Soil salinity is an
adverse environmental problem affecting agriculture and over 800 million
hectares of the world land is affected by salt stress. To study the effect of
salt stress on L. aspera, one month old seedlings were subjected to salt
stress. The study showed a significant reduction of chlorophyll content after
72 hours of treatment with 150 mM and higher salt concentrations. Vacuolar
Na+/H+ exchanger (NHX1) is one of the key gene playing a vital role in salt
tolerance. Bioinformatic tools were used to identify conserved regions of NHX1
and to design degenerate primers. The NHX1 gene homologue was isolated and
sequenced from L. aspera and submitted to NCBI (National Center for
Biotechnology Information) database. The real time PCR based expression study
showed significant upregulated expression of NHX1 after the plant subjected to
salt stress up to 12 hours but a reduction in expression was observed after 24
hours.
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