Herbaceous Peony (Paeonia lactiflora Pall.) as an Alternative Source of Oleanolic and Ursolic Acids

Chunhua Zhou,Ying Zhang,Yue Hu,Jun Tao,Yanle Sheng,Sansan Lv,Daqiu Zhao

doi:10.3390/ijms12010655

Abstract

Oleanolic acid (OA) and ursolic acid (UA) have been proven to possess many biological activities, and much attention is focused on the search for plants which are rich in OA and UA. In this report, the OA and UA accumulation characteristics were investigated in 47 cultivars of Chinese herbaceous peony (Paeonia lactiflora Pall.) and were followed in three cultivars over different developmental stages as measured by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). OA and UA levels in leaves and stems demonstrated an overall upward trend from May 1 to September 15 except for UA in the leaves of “Hong Feng”. The maximum values of OA and UA in leaves of “Yangfei Chu Yu”, “Fen Zhu Pan” and “Hong Feng” were 852.98, 575.60, 290.48 μg/g FW and 924.94, 827.36, 432.67 μg/g FW, respectively. The maximum values of OA and UA in stems of “Yangfei Chu Yu”, “Fen Zhu Pan” and “Hong Feng” were 359.28, 90.49, 43.90 μg/g FW and 326.86, 82.25, 56.63 μg/g FW, respectively. OA and UA contents in leaves of 47 different herbaceous peony cultivars ranged from 66.73–618.12 and 36.23–665.14 μg/g FW, respectively, with average values of 171.62 and 227.57 μg/g FW, respectively. The results suggested that the aboveground parts of herbaceous peony may be used as an alternative source of OA and UA for medicinal purposes in addition to its ornamental purposes.

Highlights

Herbaceous peony (Paeonia lactiflora Pall.), belonging to the Paeoniaceae family [1], is a perennial herb, and widely distributed in China
Many reports have shown that OA and ursolic acid (UA) mainly exist in Chaenomeles sinensis [16], Crataegus pinnatifida [17], Diospyros kaki [18,19], Eriobotrya japonica [20,21], Eucalyptus globules [22], Ligustrum lucidum [23], Macrocarpium officinalis [24], Zizyphus jujuba [25], and other species
In the following four developmental stages, significant differences between cultivars were observed, and the highest and lowest OA and UA contents were found in ―Yangfei Chu Yu‖ and ―Hong

Summary

Introduction

Herbaceous peony (Paeonia lactiflora Pall.), belonging to the Paeoniaceae family [1], is a perennial herb, and widely distributed in China. Herbaceous peony is rich in different kinds of bioactive components, such as monoterpenes [2,3,4], volatile oil [5], triterpenes [6,7], tannins [8], stilbenes [9], flavonoids [7,10] and polyphenols [11,12], among which paeoniflorin—a kind of monoterpene—is the most studied medicinal compound [3,13,14,15]. Previous studies of herbaceous peony were mainly focused on the root [3,4,11,12,14,31], with monoterpenes as the main compounds. There were few reports about the characterization and quantification of OA and UA in the aboveground parts of herbaceous peony

Results

Discussion

Conclusion