The ubiquitous tulsi in your backyard may be a potent weapon against all kinds of cancer, so believes a team of researchers led by an Indian-origin scientist.
Tulsi or basil has eugenol that helps fight cancer. Now the research team is genetically modifying tulsi in the lab to produce the anti-cancerous compound in abundance.
“When you grind basil leaves, a compound called eugenol comes out. If I could make it produce eugenol in higher amounts, that basil plant would serve as a storehouse of that anti-cancerous compound,” said Chandrakanth Emani, assistant professor of plant molecular biology at Western Kentucky University-Owensboro (WKU-O) in the US.
In his lab at the Owensboro facility, Emani and his students are genetically engineering the basil to produce more eugenol, a compound in basil that, in his words, “has a very great pharmaceutical value because it’s shown to control breast cancer”.
“Eugenol, when they put it on a plate where there are tumour cells, it stopped growth of the tumour cells. That was a proof of concept experiment which was done a long time back,” said Emani, in a press release issued by the university.
The next phase in the research project would be to test the compound as an effective cancer
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