Herbarium plant specimens from

The collection of plant tissue is quite different from animal tissue collection. The discussion of collection of plant and animal tissue by Dessauer et al.2S is detailed and helpful. However, the recommendations for procedures unique to plant tissue collection are somewhat misleading and outdated, especially when tropical collections are involved. Plant tissue can now be collected and transported as either fresh tissue (leaves and/or shoot cuttings) or preserved tissue the latter either as cryopreserved tissue (liquid nitrogen or dry ice) or as dried tissue (air-dried, herbarium-dried, lyophilized, or chemically dried). Ambient-temperature liquid chemical preservation techniques (such as those routinely done for herbarium plant specimens in the tropics) so far have been ineffective in maintaining adequate yields of high-quality DNA.15 It should be stressed again that the manner of collecting plant tissue is dictated by several other factors what macromolecule (DNA, RNA, or isozymes) will be examined, what type of nucleic acid extraction method will be used (or, more impor-... 

Plants being studied as part of an ethnobotanical project need to be correctly identified with help from a botanist. In many cases, especially if the results are to be published, a sample of each species needs to be deposited as a voucher in a national herbarium and the voucher number given to each specimen quoted in publications. If plant specimens are to be transferred between countries then a Material Transfer Agreement (MTA) is needed, such agreements are sometimes needed by a herbarium even when specimens are being transferred within a country. If specimens are to be taken out of a country then an agreement should be in place that deals with the fair and... 

The plant material was collected from two different localities in northern Anatolia, firstly from the vicinity of Oymalitepe village, Yomra town, Trabzon at 600 m altitude (coded as LC-T) and secondly from Bagirankaya plataeu, Ikizdere town, Rize at 2,000 m altitude (coded as LC-R) in 2001. The identification of the plant samples was carried out by Dr. Salih Terzioglu from the Department of Forest Botany, Faculty of Forestry, Karadeniz Technical University, Trabzon, Turkey. The voucher specimen (GUE 2216) has been deposited at the Herbarium of the Faculty of Pharmacy of Gazi University, Ankara, Turkey. 

Salvia frigida Boiss. is a perennial plant, growing to height of 10-30 (-50) cm with pink flowers. Salvia frigida Boiss. was collected in June 2005 from Keltepe-Kocaeli-Turkey. A voucher specimen is deposited in the Herbarium of the Biology Department, University of Marmara. 

We acknowledge financial support from DAAD/NAPRECA, The International Foundation for Science (IFS) in association with Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and The Inter-University Council of East Africa Research initiative (VicRes). We are also grateful to the respondents and the general community in Bukoba Rural district from where plant materials were collected. Messrs F.M. Mbago and S. Haji of the Herbarium, Botany department of the University of Dar es Salaam are thanked for identifying plant voucher specimens. 

There have already appeared many chapters on Strychnos alkaloids, including those of calabash curare, in previous volumes (7-6) of this treatise. Although extensive studies on Strychnos alkaloids were carried out and many of the main structural classes of alkaloids were determined by the mid-1960s, various types of new alkaloids have since been found and efficiently characterized, sometimes even from small pieces, of herbarium specimens of Strychnos plants. 

Plant material The fruit of Randia siamensis was collected from Nakompathom Province, Thailand, in July, 1984. Authentication was achieved by comparison with herbarium specimens in the Botany Section, Technical Division, Department of Agriculture, Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperative, Thailand. A voucher specimen of plant material has been deposited in the herbarium of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Chulalongkom University. 

Plant material The root bark of Dictamnus dasycarpus was purchased from Shanghai Medicine Materia Corporation, and identified by Prof Jixian Guo of School of Pharmacy, Shanghai Medical University. A voucher specimen is deposited in the Herbarium of Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences. 

Plant material. The plant of /. denticulata f pirmatipartita Kitag.was collected in Dabie Mountains at Luotian county, Hubei province, China, in October 1992. /. sonchifolia Hance. was purchased from Nanjing Company of Traditional Chinese Medicine, in February 1991. Voucher specimen is deposited in the Herbarium of the Department of Pharmacognosy, China Pharmaceutical University. 

This procedure has been used with success on a wide variety of plant groups and even some animals. The method is used to isolate total genomic DNA (nuclear, chloroplast, and mitochondrial). It is a rapid, inexpensive method that is suitabie for use in conjunction with other protocois, such as isolation of DNA enriched for cpDNA. it is also easy to scale down for use in population sampling, using 0.01 g or less of fresh tissue. Other applications include isolation of DNA from herbarium specimens (Doyle Dickson, 1987. Taxon 36 715-722), and isolation of RNA. A brief word on the history of the protocol is in order. This procedure was modified by us (Doyle and Doyle, 1987. Phytochemical Bulletin 19 11-15) for use with fresh piant tissue from a method of Saghai-Maroof et al. (1984, PNAS USA 81 8014-8019) who used lyophilized tissue. They in turn had developed their procedure from earlier protocols. We were recently asked to publish a slightly modified version of our procedure (Doyle and Doyle, 1990 Focus 12 13-15). We recently learned from Brian Taylor (Texas A M University, USA) that he had published a virtually identical procedure for fresh tissue, also in Focus, in 1982 (Taylor Powell, Focus 4 4-6) of which we (and apparently the editors of Focus ) were entirely unaware. It is indeed a useful procedure, thus independently confirmed. 

Some Solanum glycoalkaloids have been characterized by GC-MS analysis of their permethyl derivatives (60, 170 cf. 370) and determined in living plants and herbarium specimens by use of a radioimmunoassay (371). Like digitonin and a-tomatine, the steroidal gjycoalkaloid mixture from potato (a-solanine and a-chaconine) is able to complex with 3/ -hydroxysterols in vitro (370) which can be used for the quantitative analysis of these alkaloids (379). 

DNA was extracted from air-dried field collections or herbarium specimens with the DNeasy Plant Kit (Qiagen Inc., Valencia, California). One green shoot tip was used for extractions from large plants, or three to five green shoot tips from small plants. The extraction protocol provided by the manufacturer was used with the following modifications (provided by John Wheeler) (1) ground tissues were incubated in lysate buffer (kit Buffer API) 1 to 2 h and (2) two 50- il elutions (kit Buffer AE) were used in the final step, with each elution allowed to incubate 30 to 60 min. 

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