Protocols for Micropropagation of Woody Trees and Fruits

CHAPTER 39
MICROPROPAGATION OF CALABASH TREE
CRESCENTIA CUJETE L.
1,5 1,5 2 3
, R. ROMERO , S.J. MURCH
AND P.K. SAXENA 4
C.Z. LIU , S.S. HE
1
National Key Laboratory of Biochemical Engineering, Institute of Process
Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, P.R. China; 2 Instituto
Nacional de Biodiversidad, Apdo. Postal 22-3100, Santo Domingo, Heredia, Costa
Rica; 3 Chemistry, I.K. Barber School of Arts & Sciences, University of British
Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, B.C., Canada, V1V 1V7; 4 Department of Plant
Agriculture, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, N1G 2W1; 5 Graduate
School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, P.R. China. E-mail:
czliu@home.ipe.ac.cn
1. INTRODUCTION
The Calabash tree, Crescentia cujete L., belongs to the Bignoniaceae, a large and
primarily tropical family with few genera in temperate regions (Elias & Prance,
1978). As shown in Figure 1, it is a small tree up to 10 m high, with spreading
branches and a broad head. It has a rough bark, simple leaves and cauliflorous
flowers that appear directly from nodes on the trunk and branches. The flowers are
1–3 cm long with yellowish corolla, which have red or purple veins. It produces
large green spherical or elliptical fruits up to 13 to 20 cm in diameter with small flat
seeds embedded in the pulp. The plant is pollinated by bats (Bestmann et al., 1997).
This evergreen tree is used throughout the world as a source of medicines. It is
used as an aperient, diuretic and febrifuge, to clean wounds, and for the treatment of
headaches (Binutu, 1997; Romero, 2001). Extracts of the plant have been found to be
active against Gram positive bacteria, but not notably active against Gram negative
bacteria and have the neutralizing ability against the haemorrhagic effect of Bothrops
atrox venom (Otero et al., 2000). In Vietnam, dried fruit of the Calabash tree are sold
by the name ‘Dao Tien’ for use as a laxative and an expectorant (Kaneko et al., 1998).
Medicinally active constituents from C. cujete include: furanonaphthoquinones (Heltzel
et al., 1993), iridoids, iridoid glucosides (Kaneko et al., 1997), n-alkyl glycosides
and p-hydroxybenzoyloxy glucose (Agarwal & Popli, 1992; Kaneko et al., 1998).
427
S.M. Jain and H. Häggman (eds.), Protocols for Micropropagation of Woody Trees and Fruits, 427–436.
© 2007 Springer.