Council of Scientific and Industrial Research

Rajesh Luthra

Sushil Kumar

Suman Preet Singh Khanuja

Mahendra Pandurang Darokar

Madan Mohan Gupta

Alok Kalra

Raj Kishori Lal

Hemendra Pratap Singh

Ali Arif Naqvi

Om Parkash Dhawan

Ajit Kumar Shasney

Hari Om Misra

Mansoor Alam

Jawahar Ram Sharma

Samresh Dwivedi

Abdul Sattar

Surendra Pratap Singh

Abdul Samad

Mohammad Zaim

Mala Trivedi

Saba Shahabuddin

Vinod Shanker Dubey

The invention relates to a disease resistant and high yielding variety of opium poppy plant ( L. 2 &equals;22) christened as 'Rakshit'.

Method of producing a poppy plant

A novel esterase, cleaving acyclic monoterpenyl esters into their monoterpenols, has been detected in the crude enzymic preparation of palmarosa ( ) inflorescence. The extraction and assay condition for the enzyme has been standardized. The esterase enzyme has shown maximum activity in the alkaline pH range, with optimum temperature at 30&deg; C. using geranyl acetate (acyclic monoterpenyl acetate) as substrate. Time course hydrolysis of geranyl acetate using crude enzymic preparation revealed that after 24 hours of incubation approximately 75% geranyl acetate was hydrolyzed. The crude esterase enzyme, when stored at 4&deg; C., was quite stable for one week with 40% loss of activity. The enzyme also has the capability to hydrolyze other acyclic monoterpenyl esters such as geranyl formate and citronellyl acetate, which are normally present in several aromatic plant species.

Stable esterase obtained from palmarosa

Growing community of inventors

Lucknow, India

Rajesh Luthra