مشخصات پژوهش

Cyclotide are a group of plant cyclic peptides characterized by a head-to-tail cyclized backbone and a knotted arrangement of three conserved disulfide bonds. Cyclotides have been reported from the plant of the Rubiaceae (coffee), Violaceae (violet), Cucurbitaceae (cucurbit), and Fabaceae (legume) family [1]. Their knotted and cyclized structure helps them to have stability against thermal, chemical and enzymatic degradation, also gives them a broad diversity of biological activities including uterotonic, anti-HIV, anti-cancer, anti-bacterial, etc [2]. The proceeding of cyclotides discovery from plants increases the chance of obtaining of new cyclotides with useful activities [3]. In this study, the cyclotide composition of root and leaf of V. rupestris was extracted and analyzed by HPLC and MALDI-TOF [4, 5]. The obtained results showed that there is discrepancy between cyclotide profiles of root and leaf. The comparison of observed monoisotopic masses with reported cyclotides masses in the cybase (cyclotide database) implied that there are no new cyclotides at the first point and further sequence analyses would be needed to identify structures.