Scutellaria (Lamiaceae), which includes approximately 360–469 accepted species, is widespread in Europe, North America, East Asia, and South America. Several species have a long history being used as ...traditional medicines to treat respiratory, peptic, neurological, and hepatic and gall diseases. The phytochemistry and pharmacology of the genus Scutellaria have been developed dramatically in the past ten years, and the traditional uses and clinical studies of the genus have not been systematically summarized. Therefore, it is especially valuable to review the current state of knowledge to provide a basis for further exploration of its medicinal potential.
The review aims to provide updated information on the ethnopharmacology, the ten-year research progress of phytochemistry and pharmacology, and clinical studies of Scutellaria and to explore the potential medicinal values and further studies of Scutellaria.
This review is based on published studies and books from the library and electronic sources, including SciFinder, Scopus, PubMed, Web of Science, Baidu Scholar, CNKI, the online ethnobotanical database, and ethnobotanical monographs. This literature is related to ethnopharmacology, the ten-year research progress on the phytochemistry and pharmacology, and clinical studies of Scutellaria.
A total of 50 species, 5 subspecies and 17 varieties of the genus Scutellaria are used as traditional medicine with various biological activities. In the past ten years, 208 chemical constituents have been identified from 16 species and 1 variety of the genus Scutellaria, such as neo-clerodane diterpenoids, sesterterpenoids, terpenoids, flavonoids. Pharmacological research has demonstrated that the extracts and compounds identified from this genus exhibit extensive biological activities, including anticancer, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antiviral and antibacterial activities, effects on cardiovascular, cerebrovascular diseases as well as hepatoprotective and neuroprotective effects. The species S. baicalensis, S. barbata, and S. lateriflora and the main compounds baicalein, baicalin and wogonin are involved in clinical trials, which point the way for us to conduct further studies, such as study on the anticancer, antihypertensive, anti-infective, anti-inflammatory, neuroprotective and other effects of Scutellaria.
The species included in the genus Scutellaria can be used to treat cancer, infection, hepatic disorders, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, and other diseases. Some indications in traditional medicines have been confirmed by modern pharmacological studies, such as anticancer, anti-inflammatory, anti-infective activity, and hepatoprotective and neuroprotective effects. The available literature indicated that most of the bioactivities could be attributed to flavonoids and neo-clerodane diterpenoids. Although there are some uses of Scutellaria in clinical practice, the existing research on this genus is still limited. In order to expand the development of medicinal resources of Scutellaria, the already studied species in this genus are recommended for more comprehensive investigation on their active substances, pharmacological mechanisms, quality control, clinical use and new drug research. Additionally, it is necessary to study species that their chemical composition or pharmacological activity have not yet been investigated, especially those used in folk medicine.
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Cortex Moutan (CM), a well-known traditional Chinese medicine, is commonly used for treating various diseases in China and other eastern Asian countries. Recorded in Pharmacopeias of several ...countries, CM is now drawing increasing attention and under extensive studies in various fields. Phytochemical studies indicate that CM contains many valuable secondary metabolites, such as monoterpene glycosides and phenols. Ample evidence from pharmacological researches suggest that CM has a wide spectrum of activities, such as anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, anti-tumor, anti-diabetic, cardiovascular protective, neuroprotective, hepatoprotective effects. Moreover, various analytical methods were established for the quality evaluation and safety control of CM. This review synopsizes updated information concerning the origins, phytochemistry, pharmacology, analytical method and safety of CM, aiming to provide favorable references for modern CM research and application. In conclusion, continuing pharmacological investigations concerning CM should be conducted to unravel its pharmacological mechanisms. Further researches are necessary to obtain comprehensive and applicable analytical approach for quality evaluation and establish harmonized criteria of CM.
Vine tea (VT), derived from Ampelopsis grossedentata (Hand.-Mazz.) W.T. Wang, is an alternative tea that has been consumed widely in south China for hundreds of years. It has been shown that drinking ...VT on a daily basis improves hyperlipidemia and hyperglycemia. However, little is known about the preventive functions of VT for metabolic dysregulation and the potential pathological mechanisms involved. This paper elucidates the preventive effects of VT on the dysregulation of lipid and glucose metabolism using rats maintained on a high-fat-diet (HFD) in an attempt to explain the potential mechanisms involved.
Sprague Dawley (SD) rats were divided into five groups: a group given normal rat chow and water (control group); a group given an HFD and water (HFD group); a group given an HFD and Pioglitazone (PIO group), 5 mg /kg; and groups given an HFD and one of two doses of VT: 500 mg/L or 2000 mg/L. After 8 weeks, changes in food intake, tea consumption, body weight, serum and hepatic biochemical parameters were determined. Moreover, liver samples were isolated for pathology histology and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS)-based metabolomic research.
VT reduced the serum levels of glucose and total cholesterol, decreased glucose area under the curve in the insulin tolerance test and visibly impaired hepatic lipid accumulation. Metabolomics showed that VT treatment modulated the contents of metabolic intermediates linked to glucose metabolism (including gluconeogenesis and glycolysis), the TCA cycle, purine metabolism and amino acid metabolism.
The current results demonstrate that VT may prevent metabolic impairments induced by the consumption of an HFD. These effects may be caused by improved energy-related metabolism (including gluconeogenesis, glycolysis and TCA cycle), purine metabolism and amino acid metabolism, and reduced lipid levels in the HFD-fed rats.
The present quality control method of Chinese medicinal materials (CMM) has obvious deficiency, which cannot be compatible with the multi-target and multi-component characteristics and production ...process of CMM. Plant metabolomics with a huge impetus to comprehensively characterize the metabolites and clarify the complexity and integrity of CMM, has been widely used in the research of CMM. This article comprehensively reviewed the application of plant metabolomics in the quality control of CMM. It introduced the concept, technique, and application examples, discussed the prospects, limitations, improvements of plant metabolomics. MS and NMR, as important techniques for plant metabolomics, are mainly highlighted in the case references. The purpose of this article is to clarify the advantage of plants metabolomics for promoting the optimization of the CMM quality control system and proposing a system approach to realize the overall quality control of CMM based on plant metabolomics combined with multidisciplinary method.
Coreopsis tinctoria Nutt. (family Asteraceae) is an important traditional medicine in North America, Europe, and Asia for quite a long historical period, which has received great attention due to its ...health-benefiting activities, including disinfection, treatment sexual infection, diarrhoea, acute and chronic dysentery, red-eye swelling as well as pain, heat, thirst, hypertension, palpitation, gastrointestinal discomfort, and loss of appetite.
The purpose of this review is to give an overview of the current phytochemistry and pharmacological activities of C. tinctoria, and reveals the correlation among its traditional uses, phytochemistry, pharmacological profile, and potential toxicity.
This review is based on published studies and books from electronic sources and library, including the online ethnobotanical database, ethnobotanical monographs, Scopus, SciFinder, Baidu Scholar, CNKI, and PubMed. These reports are related to the traditional uses, phytochemistry, pharmacology, and toxicology of C. tinctoria.
Coreopsis tinctoria is traditionally used in diarrhoea, infection, and chronic metabolic diseases. From 1954 to now, more than 120 chemical constituents have been identified from C. tinctoria, such as flavonoids, polyacetylenes, polysaccharides, phenylpropanoids, and volatile oils. Flavonoids are the major bioactive components in C. tinctoria. Current research has shown that its extracts and compounds possess diverse biological and pharmacological activities such as antidiabetes, anti-cardiovascular diseases, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, protective effects on organs, neuroprotective effects, antimicrobial, and antineoplastic. Studies in animal models, including acute toxicity, long-term toxicity, and genotoxicity have demonstrated that Snow Chrysanthemum is a non-toxic herb, especially for its water-soluble parts.
Recent findings regarding the main phytochemical and pharmacological properties of C. tinctorial have confirmed its traditional uses in anti-infection and treatment of chronic metabolic disease and, more importantly, have revealed the plant as a valuable medicinal plant resource for the treatment of a wide range of diseases. The available reports indicated that most of the bioactivities in C. tinctorial could be attributed to flavonoids. However, higher quality studies on animals and humans studies are required to explore the efficacy and mechanism of action of C. tinctoria in future.
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The internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) region of nuclear ribosomal DNA is regarded as one of the candidate DNA barcodes because it possesses a number of valuable characteristics, such as the ...availability of conserved regions for designing universal primers, the ease of its amplification, and sufficient variability to distinguish even closely related species. However, a general analysis of its ability to discriminate species in a comprehensive sample set is lacking.
In the current study, 50,790 plant and 12,221 animal ITS2 sequences downloaded from GenBank were evaluated according to sequence length, GC content, intra- and inter-specific divergence, and efficiency of identification. The results show that the inter-specific divergence of congeneric species in plants and animals was greater than its corresponding intra-specific variations. The success rates for using the ITS2 region to identify dicotyledons, monocotyledons, gymnosperms, ferns, mosses, and animals were 76.1%, 74.2%, 67.1%, 88.1%, 77.4%, and 91.7% at the species level, respectively. The ITS2 region unveiled a different ability to identify closely related species within different families and genera. The secondary structure of the ITS2 region could provide useful information for species identification and could be considered as a molecular morphological characteristic.
As one of the most popular phylogenetic markers for eukaryota, we propose that the ITS2 locus should be used as a universal DNA barcode for identifying plant species and as a complementary locus for CO1 to identify animal species. We have also developed a web application to facilitate ITS2-based cross-kingdom species identification (http://its2-plantidit.dnsalias.org).
The genus Acer (Aceraceae), commonly known as maple, comprises approximately 129 species that primarily grow in the northern hemisphere, especially in the temperate regions of East Asia, eastern ...North America, and Europe. These plants have been traditionally used to treat a wide range of diseases in East Asia and North America. Moreover, clinical studies have shown that medicinal plants belonging to Acer are highly effective in the treatment of rheumatism, bruises, hepatic disorders, eye disease, and pain, and in detoxification. This review provides a systematic and constructive overview of the traditional uses, chemical constituents, and pharmacological activities of plants of the genus Acer.
This review is based on a literature study of scientific journals and books from libraries and electronic sources such as SciFinder, ScienceDirect, Springer, PubMed, CNKI, Google Scholar, Baidu Scholar, and Web of Science. The literature in this review related to chemical constituents and pharmacological activities dates from 1922 to the end of October 2015. Furthermore, ethnopharmacological information on this genus was obtained from libraries and herbaria in China and USA.
In traditional medicine, 40 species, 11 subspecies, and one varieta of the genus Acer are known to exhibit a broad spectrum of biological activities. To date, 331 compounds have been identified from 34 species of the genus Acer, including flavonoids, tannins, phenylpropanoids, diarylheptanoids, terpenoids, benzoic acid derivatives, and several other types of compounds, such as phenylethanoid glycosides and alkaloids. Preliminary pharmacological studies have shown that the extracts and compounds isolated from this genus exhibit a broad spectrum of biological activities such as antioxidant, antitumor, anti-inflammatory, antidiabetic, hepatoprotective, and antiobesity activities, as well as promoting osteoblast differentiation. To date, reports on the toxicity of Acer species to humans are very limited, and the major safety concern of these plants is in the veterinary field.
Based on our systematic review, Acer species can be used to treat rheumatism, hepatic disorders, eye disease, pain, etc. effectively. Some indications from ethnomedicine have been validated by pharmacological activities, such as the anti-inflammatory and hepatoprotective activities of the species. The available literature showed that most of the activities of these species can be attributed to flavonoids and tannins. To ensure the safety and efficacy in clinical practice in the future, studies identifying active molecules and clarifying their pharmacological mechanisms as well as toxicity are needed.
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Ethnobotanical knowledge is indispensable for the conservation of global biological integrity, and could provide irreplaceable clues for bioprospecting aiming at new food crops and medicines. This ...biocultural diversity requires a comprehensive documentation of such intellectual knowledge at local levels. However, without systematically capturing the data, those regional records are fragmented and can hardly be used. In this study, we develop a framework to assemble the cross-cultural ethnobotanical knowledge at a genus level, including capturing the species’ diversity and their cultural importance, integrating their traditional uses, and revealing the intercultural relationship of ethnobotanical data quantitatively. Using such a cross-cultural ethnobotanical assembly, the medicinal and culinary values of the genus
Lycium
are evaluated. Simultaneously, the analysis highlights the problems and options for a systematic cross-cultural ethnobotanical knowledge assembly. The framework used here could generate baseline data relevant for conservation and sustainable use of plant diversity as well as for bioprospecting within targeting taxa.
Illumina second generation sequencing is now an efficient route for generating enormous sequence collections that represent expressed genes and quantitate expression level. Taxus is a world-wide ...endangered gymnosperm genus and forms an important anti-cancer medicinal resource, but the large and complex genomes of Taxus have hindered the development of genomic resources. The research of its tissue-specific transcriptome is absent. There is also no study concerning the association between the plant transcriptome and metabolome with respect to the plant tissue type.
We performed the de novo assembly of Taxus mairei transcriptome using Illumina paired-end sequencing technology. In a single run, we produced 13,737,528 sequencing reads corresponding to 2.03 Gb total nucleotides. These reads were assembled into 36,493 unique sequences. Based on similarity search with known proteins, 23,515 Unigenes were identified to have the Blast hit with a cut-off E-value above 10⁻⁵. Furthermore, we investigated the transcriptome difference of three Taxus tissues using a tag-based digital gene expression system. We obtained a sequencing depth of over 3.15 million tags per sample and identified a large number of genes associated with tissue specific functions and taxane biosynthetic pathway. The expression of the taxane biosynthetic genes is significantly higher in the root than in the leaf and the stem, while high activity of taxane-producing pathway in the root was also revealed via metabolomic analyses. Moreover, many antisense transcripts and novel transcripts were found; clusters with similar differential expression patterns, enriched GO terms and enriched metabolic pathways with regard to the differentially expressed genes were revealed for the first time.
Our data provides the most comprehensive sequence resource available for Taxus study and will help define mechanisms of tissue specific functions and secondary metabolism in non-model plant organisms.
Metabolic fingerprinting was applied to the classification of section Moutan of genus Paeonia. HPLC–DAD multivariate analyses exhibited a clear separation between the species and contributed to the ...clarification of the confusion and skepticism associated with the taxonomy of tree peonies. Display omitted
•Clear separation into four groups was obtained between tree peony species.•Good agreement was obtained with the two subsections Vaginatae and Delavayanae.•P. decomposita was found to be a transition species between the two subsections.•P. ostii and P. suffruticosa can be classified as one species (s.l.).•There is significant variation in the metabolic profiles of P. delavayi.
The section Moutan of the genus Paeonia consists of eight species that are confined to a small area in China. A wide range of metabolites, including monoterpenoid glucosides, flavonoids, tannins, stilbenes, triterpenoids, steroids, paeonols, and phenols, have been found in the species belonging to section Moutan. However, although previous studies have analyzed the metabolites found in these species, the metabolic similarities that can be used for the chemotaxonomic distinction of section Moutan species are not yet clear. In this study, HPLC–DAD-based metabolic fingerprinting was applied to the classification of eight species: Paeoniasuffruticosa, Paeoniaqiui, Paeoniaostii, Paeoniarockii, Paeoniajishanensis, Paeoniadecomposita, Paeoniadelavayi, and Paeonialudlowii. In total, of the 47 peaks that exhibited an occurrence frequency of 75% in all 23 tree peony samples, 43 of these metabolites were identified according to their retention times and UV absorption spectra, together with combined HPLC–QTOF-MS. These data were compared with reference standard compounds. The 43 isolated compounds included 17 monoterpenoid glucosides, 11 galloyl glucoses, 5 flavonoids, 6 paeonols and 4 phenols. Principal component analysis (PCA), and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA), showed a clear separation between the species based on metabolomics similarities and four groups were identified. The results exhibited good agreement with the classical classification based on the morphological characteristics and geographical distributions of the subsections Vaginatae F.C. Stern and Delavayanae F.C. Stern with the exception of P. decomposita, which was found to be a transition species between these two subsections. According to their metabolic fingerprinting characteristics, P. ostii and P. suffruticosa can be considered one species, and this result is consistent with the viewpoint of medicinal plant scientists but different from that of classical morphological processing. Significantly large variations were obtained in the metabolic profiles of P. delavayi, whereas no significant difference was found between P. delavayi and P. ludlowii. This indicates that these two species have a close genetic relationship. In conclusion, the combination of HPLC–DAD and multivariate analyses has great potential for guiding future chemotaxonomic studies to examine the potential pharmaceutical value of the effective constituents of tree peony species and appears to be able to clarify the confusion and skepticism associated with the reported morphology- and molecular phylogenetics-based taxonomy of tree peonies.
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