Abstract
Cancer continues to be a worldwide killer, despite the enormous amount of research and rapid developments seen during the past decade. It has been suggested that by 2020 more than 15 million new cases of cancer will be diagnosed. Since it is commonly believed that many are preventable, there is urgent need to identify/develop natural medicines as effective chemopreventive agents. The purpose of this current study was to assess the effect of isolated and characterized salicin on cyclooxygenase (COX) proteins by molecular docking studies and by assessments of the effects of drug-ligand interaction. Salicin isolated from Desmodium gangeticum, a medicinal legume, is a COX inhibitor. The present study report the extraction, isolation and identification of salicin and its interaction with COX-1 and COX-2 derivatives, which may be useful for drug-designing for anti-cancer activities. Molecular modeling and docking studies revealed the binding orientations of salicin into the active sites of COX-1 and COX-2 enzymes. Extraction, isolation and characterization of the compound 2-(hydroxymethyl) phenyl hexopyranoside, also known as ‘salicin’, from the leaves of D. gangeticum first time. Anticancer evaluation of salicin in in vivo mice model.
Highlights
Plants have been utilized as medicines for thousands of years [1], initially as crude drugs like tinctures, teas, poultices, powders and other herbal formulations [1,2]
Systematic chemical investigation of the methanolic leaf extract enabled isolation of known glycoside, 2-(hydroxymethyl)phenyl hexopyranoside (DG-1), known as ‘salicin’ which is conventionally isolated from the willow bark [50]; this is the first report of isolation of salicin from leaves of D. gangeticum
Medicinal compounds like Salicin have antiinflammatory activity, due to which they may serve as an active drug target against many toxic/pathogenic proteins like COX-2 in our study
Summary
Plants have been utilized as medicines for thousands of years [1], initially as crude drugs like tinctures, teas, poultices, powders and other herbal formulations [1,2]. The identity medicinal plants and the methods of their use were passed down through oral history, but eventually this information was recorded in herbals, and subsequently active compounds were isolated beginning with morphine from opium in the early 19th century [1,3], followed by cocaine, codeine, digitoxin and quinine [1,4,5]. Methods used to acquire compounds for drug discovery include isolation from plants and other natural sources, chemical synthesis, combinatorial chemistry and molecular modeling [6,7,8]. Drug discovery from medicinal plants has contributed to cancer treatment, and most new clinical applications during the last half century relate to cancer [4,5,9]. The attractiveness of natural compounds as drugs partly stems from their potential ability to influence multiple components of the carcinogenesis pathway
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