Welcome To Northeast Zingiberaceae Resource Centre

The information in these pages are result of motivation provided by the project " DNA Barcoding Based Biodiversity Inventory in Zingiberaceae of Northeast (NE) India" funded by Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Government of India (Project ID: 0526/T/IITG/014/0809/38). Zingiberaceae, a socio-economic-medicinally important plant of Indian subcontinent, have a strong and distinguished species concentration in Northeastern part of India. For leaping over the technical limitation for easy and accurate identification of already established species, this project was designed to assign short signature DNA sequences to individual species, popularly known as DNA barcode. The information is accrued over a stretch of four years, during various excursion activities undertaken during the flowering season (March-August) to various Northeastern states.

 

 

About Zingiberaceae

Zingiberaceaes are aromatic perennial herbs belonging to the group angiosperm (the flowering plants) and find its uses in various domain of life. With a large ensemble of 50 genera and 1,548 reported species, it is an important contributor to medicines, ornamentally important flowers, food condiments and spices.

 

The rhizome is the primary reason for its importance, while its vivid and attractive inflorescence imparts ornamental values to the family. They are distributed pantropicaly with high concentration of diversity in Southeast Asia and are used frequently as homemade remedy for dyspepsia, colic, cold. The recent scientific studies has shown that compounds from the family possess anti-inflammatory, antiviral, antibacterial, antifungal and antioxidant properties.

 

Some remarkably example usage of plants from this family includes: drug for cancer derived from Curcuma longa extract is under drug trials' while ginger tea (decoction of ginger along with tea leaves) has long been used against common cold and flu and on a different note Hedychium coronarium is national flower of cuba because of its beautiful inflorescence and spotless white colour.

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