Improving oil quality by altering levels of fatty acids through marker-assisted selection of <Emphasis Type="Italic">ahfad2</Emphasis> alleles in peanut (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Arachis hypogaea</Emphasis> L.)

Peanut plays a key role to the livelihood of millions in the world especially in Arid and Semi-Arid regions. Peanut with high oleic acid content aids to increase shelf-life of peanut oil as well as food products and extends major health benefits to the consumers. In peanut, ahFAD2 gene controls quantity of two major fatty acids viz, oleic and linoleic acids. These two fatty acids together with palmitic acid constitute 90% fat composition in peanut and regulate the quality of peanut oil. Here, two ahfad2 alleles from SunOleic 95R were introgressed into ICGV 05141 using marker-assisted selection. Marker-assisted breeding effectively increased oleic acid and oleic to linoleic acid ratio in recombinant lines up to 44% and 30%, respectively as compared to ICGV 05141. In addition to improved oil quality, the recombinant lines also had superiority in pod yield together with desired pod/seed attributes. Realizing the health benefits and ever increasing demand in domestic and international market, the high oleic peanut recombinant lines will certainly boost the economical benefits to the Indian farmers in addition to ensuring availability of high oleic peanuts to the traders and industry.     

Design and Synthesis of Analogues of Marine Natural Product Galaxamide,an N-methylated Cyclic Pentapeptide,as Potential Anti-Tumor Agent in Vitro

Herein, we report design and synthesis of novel 26 galaxamide analogues with N-methylated cyclo-pentapeptide, and their in vitro anti-tumor activity towards the panel of human tumor cell line, such as, A549, A549/DPP, HepG2 and SMMC-7721 using MTT assay. We have also investigated the effect of galaxamide and its representative analogues on growth, cell-cycle phases, and induction of apoptosis in SMMC-7721 cells in vitro. Reckon with the significance of conformational space and N-Me aminoacid (aa) comprising this compound template, we designed the analogues with modification in N-Me-aa position, change in aa configuration from l to d aa and substitute one Leu-aa to d/l Phe-aa residue with respective to the parent structure. The efficient solid phase parallel synthesis approach is employed for the linear pentapeptide residue containing N-Me aa, followed by solution phase macrocyclisation to afford target cyclo pentapeptide compounds. In the present study, all galaxamide analogues exhibited growth inhibition in A549, A549/DPP, SMMC-7721 and HepG2 cell lines. Compounds 6, 18, and 22 exhibited interesting activities towards all cell line tested, while Compounds 1, 4, 15, and 22 showed strong activity towards SMMC-7221 cell line in the range of 1–2 μg/mL IC₅₀. Flow cytometry experiment revealed that galaxamide analogues namely Compounds 6, 18, and 22 induced concentration dependent SMMC-7721 cell apoptosis after 48 h. These compounds induced G0/G1 phase cell-cycle arrest and morphological changes indicating induction of apoptosis. Thus, findings of our study suggest that the galaxamide and its analogues 6, 18 and 22 exerted growth inhibitory effect on SMMC-7721 cells by arresting the cell cycle in the G0/G1 phase and inducing apoptosis. Compound 1 showed promising anti-tumor activity towards SMMC-7721 cancer cell line, which is 9 and 10 fold higher than galaxamide and reference DPP (cisplatin), respectively.