Efficient enhancement of gallic acid accumulation in cell suspension cultures of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Barringtonia racemosa</Emphasis> L. by elicitation

The bioactive compound, bacoside A, has immense importance for the treatment of memory disorders and Alzheimer’s disease. Due to the growing commercial interest in the herb, Bacopa monnieri, it has been listed as highly endangered species. The present study was aimed at enhancing the production of bacoside A using an alternative technology of plant cell suspension culture. Initial experiments of docking simulations using bacoside A showed good inhibition of acetyl cholinesterase (binding energy value of ??20 kcal/mol), when comparison was made with other phytocompounds and the synthetic drug for Alzheimer’s disease. In vitro experiments established that B. monnieri cell suspension culture can be developed in Murashige and Skoog medium containing containing 0.1 mg/L benzylaminopurine and 0.5 mg/L naphthalene acetic acid. Plackett–Burman studies predicted that the most effective factors for maximum biomass production were inoculum size (t-value of 4.87), sucrose concentration (t-value of 0.25) and KH₂PO₄ concentration (t-value of 0.007). The nitrate to ammonium ratio (t-value of ? 0.42) did not have significant effect on the cell suspension biomass. The optimum concentration of the crucial variables obtained from a central composite design were—inoculum size of 2 g/L, sucrose concentration of 30 g/L and KH₂PO₄ concentration of 1.24 mM in one-sixth strength MS medium. The best model for optimum production of biomass and bacoside A was experimentally verified and the correlation between the predicted and actual values was found to be 99% for biomass and 94% for bacoside A production. The experimental results have been discussed in the present work.