Original Articles
Rajwant Kaur, Avinash Kaur Nag
Abstract
Natural plant products as nutrition supplements hav e gained lots of attention these days. Among differ ent plants products, apicultural products such as pollen grain s are widely used as medicines and dietary suppleme nts due to presence of essential nutrients like amino acids, p roteins, flavonoids and alkaloids. As the compositi on of different essential and non-essential amino acids defines the accurate nutritional value, the present study focu ses on composition of free amino acids in pollen grains of some medicinally important plant species viz., Bau hinia purpurea, Bauhinia variegata, Cassia biflora, Cassi a fistula, Cassia glauca, Cassia saimea, Delonix re gia, Hibiscus rosa sinensis and Melia azadirach. 18 different ami no acids were analyzed using amino acid analyzer. A mong all plant species, it was observed that Cassia fistula had maximum number (17) of amino acids. The order o f different plant species on the basis of number of amino acids was Cassia fistula (17) > Melia azadirach (16) > B auhinia purpurea (13) = Cassia biflora (13) = Hibiscus rosa sinensis (13) > Bauhinia variegata (12) > Cassia g lauca (11) = Delonix regia (11) > Cassia saimea (10). It was f ound that four amino acids viz., aspartic acid, asp araginine, β - Alanine and alanine were present in all plant speci es studied.