Phytochemical characterization and comparative studies of four Cecropia species collected in Panama using multivariate data analysis

Luc Pieters,Catherina Caballero-George,Sandra Apers,Sebastiaan Bijttebier,Kenn Foubert,Deborah Custers,Orlando O Ortíz,Andrés Rivera-Mondragón,Emmy Tuenter

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-38334-4

Abstract

Plant species of the genus Cecropia (Urticaceae) are used as traditional medicine in Latin-America, and are commercially available as food supplements. The aim of this study was to characterize and compare the phytochemical constituents of four Cecropia species collected in Panama. The structures of 11 compounds isolated from leaves of C. obtusifolia were elucidated based on high resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopic analysis; the polyphenolic constituents of leaves of all four Cecropia species and commercial products were characterized using high performance liquid chromatography-diode array detection-quadrupole time of flight-tandem high resolution mass spectrometry (HPLC-DAD-QTOF). Forty-seven compounds were fully identified or tentatively characterized. Thirty-nine of these have not been previously reported for the species under investigation. Multivariate analysis revelead that C. obtusifolia and C. insignis are the most related species, while C. hispidissima is the most segregated one. Considering the importance of the description of novel chemical entities and the increasing interest and use of natural products, this study may be of great help for chemotaxonomic purposes, the interpretation of medicinal properties and for quality assessment of herbal supplements containing Cecropia leaves.

Highlights

It is well known that many medicinal plants with similar morphology and the same folk name among species within the same genus can be misidentified and intentionally or accidentally be substituted in commercial products during the manufacturing process, and may result in the loss of efficacy and safety
Latin American folk medicine emphasizes on the widespread use of C. obtusifolia and C. peltata for the treatment of diabetes mellitus and hypertention[7,8,9,10,11,12,13]
Two LC-high resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) chemical profiling studies have been conducted on C. pachystachya and C. holoceuca[44,45] collected in Brazil; in the present work we report for the first time a comprehensive chemical profiling method using HPLC-DAD-QTOF and a multivariate analytical aproach to reveal differences and similarities in the phytochemical composition of C. obtusifolia, C. peltata, C. insignis and C. hispidissima collected in Panama

Summary

Introduction

It is well known that many medicinal plants with similar morphology and the same folk name among species within the same genus can be misidentified and intentionally or accidentally be substituted in commercial products during the manufacturing process, and may result in the loss of efficacy and safety. Latin American folk medicine emphasizes on the widespread use of C. obtusifolia and C. peltata for the treatment of diabetes mellitus and hypertention[7,8,9,10,11,12,13] These two species are reported to be distributed in México, Central America, the Caribbean region, Colombia and Ecuador[14]. C. glaziovii, C. pachystachya and C. hololeuca (distributed in South America, mainly in Brazil and Argentina) are frequently used for the control of inflammation, hypertension and respiratory conditions[15,16,17,18,19,20,21] These species have been largely studied through several phytochemical and pharmacological investigations reported in literature, where most of them have focused on polar compounds from leaf extracts. SS-sitosterol, ursolic, tormentic, euscaphic, isoarjulonic and pomolic acid from root and leaf extracts from C. pachystachya have been reported[31,32,33]

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