An ethnobotanical study of medicinal plants (MPs) used by the local community has been carried out from January 5, 2014, to February 15, 2015, in Gozamin Wereda of East Gojjam Zone, Ethiopia. The purpose of this study was to identify and document the use and conservation of MPs, along with indigenous knowledge of Gozamin community. Data were collected using semistructured interview, field observation, and focus group discussions. The collected data were assessed quantitatively using fidelity level, Jaccard’s Coefficient of Similarity, paired comparisons, direct matrix, and preference rankings. In total 93 MPs distributed under 51 families and 87 genera were identified and for each taxon a local name (Amharic) was documented. Asteraceae with 9 (9.68%) species and Solanaceae with 7 (7.53%) species were families represented by more species in the study area. Out of these MPs collected, 80 plant species were used for the treatment of human ailments, 24 species were used against livestock diseases, and 11 common plant species were listed in both cases. The most frequently used plant parts were the leaves followed by the roots. The major threats to MPs in the study area were agricultural expansion, overgrazing, fire wood collection, mining, and cutting down trees for construction and furniture. Therefore, there is a need for appropriate in situ and ex situ conservation measures.

Vanilla (Vanilla planifolia Andr.) is a multipurpose spice in the world. The crop had been introduced to Ethiopia from Mauritius and it is still under maintenance at the Tepi National Spices Research Center (TNSRC). It is commonly propagated through stem cuttings which could arrests subsequent plant growth and development and serves as an ideal means for the spread of varied diseases. To solve the mentioned problems, no efficient in vitro protocol had so far been developed to propagate this vanilla clone in Ethiopia. Therefore, this study was initiated to address this gap by developing efficient protocol for the enhanced multiplication of this accession (Van.2/05). In this study plant material was taken from TNSRC. The experiments were carried out in Jimma Agricultural Research Center (JARC) at Biotechnology Laboratory. Nodal explants and Murashige and Skoog (MS) (1962), basal medium were used exclusively throughout the experiments. The experiments were laid out in Completely Randomized Design (CRD) with factorial treatment combinations and replicated three times for plant growth regulator (PGR) assisted experiments. In the study, shoot multiplication, the combined use of 2 mg l^-1 6-Benzylamino Purine (BAP) and 0.5 mg l^-1 Naphthalene Acetic Acid (NAA) was proved to be the best providing the highest shoot mean number (5.33) and length (4.9 cm) of shoots after five weeks of culture. The combined use of different MS basal medium strengths and Indol -3-Acetic Acid (IAA) concentrations were employed. Therefore, ½ MS strength combined with 0.5 mg l^-1IAA produced mean number of 4.00 roots per plantlet with mean length of 6.1cm. The average rate of ex-vitro survival was 83.4%. Therefore, the advent of this protocol could have considerable value to enhance the expansion of vanilla cultivation in Ethiopia.

The search for technologies for crop improvement has been a continuous practice to address the food insecurity to the growing human population with an ever decreasing arable land and dynamic climate change around the world. Considering the potential technologies for crop improvement could close the rooms of poverty in developing countries in particular and around the globe at large. This review aimed to assess the site-directed mutation creation methods and to show the potential tools for future crop improvement programs. Site-directed mutagenesis was found to be an efficient process to create targeted mutation on cereal crops, horticultural crops, oilseed crops, and others. Agronomic traits such as yield, quality, and stress tolerance have been improved using site-directed mutagenesis. Besides, selectable marker elimination was also reported from transgenic crops by targeted mutation. Most of the reports on site-directed mutagenesis is focusing on cereal crops (58.339%) followed by horticultural crops (22.92%). Among the four mutagenic tools that have been reported, the CRISPR/Ca9 technology was found to be frequently used (66.67%) followed by TALENs. This tool is potential since it is efficient in creating targeted mutagenesis and less likely off-target effect, so it is repeatedly used in different research works. TALENs were used usually to knockout genes with bad traits. Moreover, the mutation created by mutagenic tools found to be efficient, and the mutated traits proved as it was heritable to generations. Hence, site-directed mutagenesis by the CRISPR/Cas9 system is advisable for agricultural development thereby ensuring food sustainability around the world.

Modeling and characterization the transition state structure of enzyme catalyzed reactions is essential. A DFT method employing B3LYP level of theory with 6-31G (d',p') basis set for non-metals and LanL2DZ basis set for molybdenum have been used. The bond orders of chemical fragments were calculated using AOmix softaware. The effect of chalcogen replacement, amine group and methyl group in the parent structure of xanthine bound to xanthine oxidase active site were compared. The transition state structure of model substrates (2AX, 2A6TP, 2A6SP and 2A6MP) bound to the truncated form of XO active site has been confirmed by the presence of one negative imaginary frequencies (s-1) (-60), (-140), (-230) and (-270), respectively. The corresponding normalized energy barriers (kcal/mol) from pre-transition state to the transition state, respectively, are (13.869), (21.753), (23.109) and (0.212). In this work, 2A6SP and 2A6TP substrates were found to be potential xanthine oxidase inhibitors. The large bond distances and minimum bond order for CRH-HRH bond, and small bond distances and maximum bond order for SMo-HRH bond at the transition state for chalcogen replaced 2AX confirms early transition state structure. Methyl substituted 2AX analog found to have post transition state structure. A potential xanthine oxidase inhibitor can be designed from purine family enzymes using DFT approach.