Medicinal plants are nearly unlimited source of phytochemicals. Centella asiatica L. is a tropical medicinal plant with a long history of therapeutic uses, dermal disorders, venous insufficiency micro-angiopathy, and anticancer. The present study highlights (i) in vivo evaluation of asiatic acid (as an anticancer compound) content in different plant parts of C. asiatica and (ii) in vitro elicitation of asiatic acid employing organic elicitors. Based on the HPLC analysis, the highest amount of asiatic acid (190.2 μg·g-1 fresh wt.) was found in root part in in vivo condition. Quantitative analyses were done to enhance of asiatic acid content by some organic elicitors. Results showed the highest quantity of asiatic acid content (258.3 μg·g-1 fw.) among all of the organic elicitors was found at 200 mg·L-1 yeast extract in leaf callus cultures. All these observations suggest that exogenous application of organic elicitors could have induced a subset of secondary metabolite biosynthetic genes, which may modulate expression of genes and accumulation of compounds induced by elicitors.
