Researchers cultivate new medicinal chamomile

Scientists at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna have been working on developing new varieties of chamomile that can be cultivated as a medicinal plant.

The researchers have been trying to identify varieties that will bloom longer and make its cultivation easier. Their methods and results have recently been published in the scientific press.

Chamomile is a medicinal plant used mainly in the treatment of stomach and intestinal diseases, including the field of veterinary medicine. Agricultural scientist Bettina Fähnrich from the Institute of Animal Nutrition and Functional Plant Compounds has been focusing on the genetics of chamomile (Matricaria recutita). She has been looking for chamomile varieties with a triploid (threefold) set of chromosomes instead of the natural diploid (double) set.

Plants with the triploid form produce blooms that last longer and have a longer harvesting period. An additional advantage of a triploid variety of chamomile is that most of the seeds produced would be sterile. This slows down the reproductive cycle so that the plant would not germinate in the following season, when the farmer wants to grow another crop in the field. This means less chamomile has to be removed as a weed in subsequent years. But finding such a triploid variety did not turn out to be an easy task.

Chamomile is widely used in alternative medicine but is rarely grown in Austria. Currently, the majority of chamomile that is processed in Austria is imported from South America, Egypt and Eastern Europe. Therefore one of Fähnrich's aims is to make chamomile an attractive crop for Austrian and Central European farmers again.