Abstract
The practice of spending time in green areas to gain the health benefits provided by trees is well known, especially in Asia, as ‘forest bathing’, and the consequent protective and experimentally detectable effects on the human body have been linked to the biogenic volatile organic compounds released by plants. Houseplants are common in houses over the globe and are particularly appreciated for aesthetic reasons as well for their ability to purify air from some environmental volatile pollutants indoors. However, to the best of our knowledge, no attempt has been made to describe the health benefits achievable from houseplants thanks to the biogenic volatile organic compounds released, especially during the day, from some of them. Therefore, we performed the present study, based on both a literature analysis and in silico studies, to investigate whether the volatile compounds and aerosol constituents emitted by some of the most common houseplants (such as peace lily plant, Spathiphyllum wallisii, and iron plant, Aspidistra eliator) could be exploited in ‘indoor forest bathing’ approaches, as proposed here for the first time not only in private houses but also public spaces, such as offices, hospitals, and schools. By using molecular docking (MD) and other in silico methodologies for estimating vapor pressures and chemico-physical/pharmacokinetic properties prediction, we found that β-costol is an organic compound, emitted in appreciable amounts by the houseplant Spathiphyllum wallisii, endowed with potential antiviral properties as emerged by our MD calculations in a SARS-CoV-2 Mpro (main protease) inhibition study, together with sesquirosefuran. Our studies suggest that the anti-COVID-19 potential of these houseplant-emitted compounds is comparable or even higher than known Mpro inhibitors, such as eugenol, and sustain the utility of houseplants as indoor biogenic volatile organic compound emitters for immunity boosting and health protection.
Highlights
Numerous are the benefits that spending time in a green area can provide from both a psychological and physical perspective [1], and this is the reason why the so-called ‘forest bathing’ [2,3] is gaining more and more popularity outside its original area, Japan, together with the ‘green prescriptions’ [4], whose importance for patient care is being recognized in an increasing number of countries across the globe
The literature analysis was conducted on Medline/Pubmed and Google Scholar, using the terms ‘houseplants’, ‘biogenic volatile organic compounds’, and ‘volatile organic compounds’, excluding from the subsequent literature study those works reporting the use of house plant for removing anthropogenic volatile organic compounds, as we were interested in the plant-released volatiles
Our literature analysis showed that only few reports on houseplant volatile organic compounds are present in the literature, and that these rare examples are basically analytical works describing the composition in volatiles of emissions of specific houseplants
Summary
Numerous are the benefits that spending time in a green area can provide from both a psychological and physical perspective [1], and this is the reason why the so-called ‘forest bathing’ [2,3] is gaining more and more popularity outside its original area, Japan, together with the ‘green prescriptions’ [4], whose importance for patient care is being recognized in an increasing number of countries across the globe.
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