CYMBOPOGONCITRATUS

Anticancer Research

C. citratus (DC.) Stapf, commonly known as lemongrass or oil grass, is a tropicalplant from Southeast Asia valued for its oil (Sharma et al. 2008; Sousa et al. 2010).C. citratus is native to India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and most parts of Southeast Asia(Devi et al. 2011). This plant is from the family Poaceae and the order Poales(Lakshman et al. 2010). It is a tall aromatic coarse grass of 1.5 m high with longgreen leaves (Asaolu et al. 2009). The stem is reddish brown in color and it isattached to the bulb by stalk. It is a short-day plant and has profuse flowering. C.citratus is used for culinary and medicinal purposes. C. citratus produces essentialoil which contains various chemical compounds used in perfumery, cooking, andpharmaceutical industries. The ethnobotanical uses of C. citratus include treatmentof fever, infection, headaches, and cancer (Runnie et al. 2004). To date, studies onendophytes from C. citratus are limited to biodiversity studies. Krishnamurthy andHemalatha (2008) revealed the following species that can be found in C. citratus:
Aspergillus sp., Cladosporium sp., Gliocladium roseum, Macrophoma sp.,Penicillium notatum, and Trichoderma viride. Deshmukh et al. (2010) furtheridentified Cladosporium cladosporioides, Drechslera sp., Colletotrichumgloeosporioides, and Phyllosticta sp. as endophytes from C. citratus, with higherendophyte abundance detected in leaf than the rhizome samples. In a recent studyby Chow and Ting (2015), endophytic Dothideomycetes sp. P15E6, F. proliferatum,and Phoma sp. were found in C. citratus. Their study is among the first few todocument the L-asparaginase production by these endophytes, revealing thatendophytes from medicinal (anticancer) plants have the properties to produceanticancer compounds (L-asparaginase).