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Endangered Medicinal Plants of Temperate Regions: Conservation and Maintenance
Published in Amit Baran Sharangi, K. V. Peter, Medicinal Plants, 2023
Protection of medicinal plants can be made by the ex-situ, i.e., outside from the natural habitat by cultivating and maintaining vegetation in botanic gardens, parks, other suitable sites, and through long term protection of plant propagules in gene banks (seed bank, pollen bank, DNA libraries, etc.), and plant tissue culture repositories and by cryopreservation). Botanical gardens can play a key role in ex-situ conservation of plants, especially those facing imminent threat of extinction (Bhardwaj et al., 2011). Species conserved ex situ can also suffer genetic erosion and depend on continued human care (Mukherjee et al., 2015). The disadvantage of ex-situ protection is that the plant sample of various species conserved ex-situ (e.g., Swertia chirayita) might signify a thin array of heritable difference than that which occurs in the wild (Mukherjee and Chakrabarty, 2010). North Eastern Himalaya range of India is the native place of three high value endangered medicinal plants viz. Coptis teeta, Swertia chirayita, and Valeriana jatamansi. Cultivation and conservation aspects of these plants are discussed here in detail as per research findings from 2005 to 2014 in Eastern Himalaya in Darjeeling subdivision of West Bengal, India (Figure 9.1).
The Disappearance and Substitution of Native Medicinal Species
Published in Mahendra Rai, Shandesh Bhattarai, Chistiane M. Feitosa, Wild Plants, 2020
Habitat modification occurs due to changes in ecosystem, for example, increase in the size of cities, road constructions, bridges, change to agricultural/livestock land, and other modifications due to anthropic action. Due to this, there is a reduction in the size of the original ecosystems, that is to say, the habitat is fragmented, and this produces a progressive loss of the species that inhabit the site, and the plant populations are reduced as the surface size of the sites decreases. In this context, medicinal species may be affected, populations decline, genetic erosion takes place, and eventually the population disappears.
Genetic Resources of Syzygium cumini in India
Published in K. N. Nair, The Genus Syzygium, 2017
S. K. Malik, Rekha Chaudhury, Vartika Srivastava, Sanjay Singh
The documented genetic diversity in jamun has not been exploited for the genetic improvement program. The available genetic diversity is facing the threat of genetic erosion as a result of large-scale developmental activities related to urbanization and lack of arable land for agriculture. The genetic diversity of the wild-related species of jamun is of immense value for the search of resistance to physiological races of pathotypes of fungi, bacteria, viruses, and nematodes, besides winter hardiness, resistance to drought, salinity, and so forth.
Evaluation of the genetic structure of Bromus inermis populations from chemically and radioactively polluted areas using microsatellite markers from closely related species
Published in International Journal of Radiation Biology, 2022
Elena V. Antonova, Marion S. Röder
The observed structure of genetic variety in each population can identically be the result of neutral mutations, segregation, relocation, genetic drifting, or the founder effect (Hedrick 2011). High levels of genetic diversity in natural populations may be connected with wide volatility in an ecological niche (Babbel and Selander 1974; Prentice et al. 1995). Low genetic variability may be associated with ‘genetic erosion’ (van Straalen and Timmermans 2002). In spite of heterogeneity among studies, there is an overall negative effect of technogenic stress on genetic diversity. The populations inhabiting human-transfigured landscapes have reduced evolutionary potential and are addicted to local extinction (Almeida-Rocha et al. 2020). In our investigation, the average number of alleles per locus and an effective number of alleles per locus in the chemically and radioactively polluted B. inermis populations did not differ from the control populations. The mean values of Wright’s fixation index in the background area were 1.26–1.41 times higher than in the impact populations. This indicates an increased deficiency of heterozygous genotypes in the B. inermis control populations. In general, in brome populations growing for a long time under anthropogenic stress, a decrease in genetic diversity is not observed. The unexposed and affected B. inermis populations also had similar DNA contents (Antonova et al. 2020). There were also no differences observed in the level of genetic diversity between the unstressed and stressed Trifolium pratense plants (Rybak et al. 2018), rockcress (Van Rossum et al. 2004), Lactuca sativa (Monteiro et al. 2007), Apodemus uralensis (Modorov and Pozolotina 2011), Myodes glareolus (Meeks et al. 2009) and Aporrectodea caliginosa (Rybak et al. 2020), and others.