Uncovering Active Constituents Responsible for Different Activities of Raw and Steamed Panax notoginseng Roots.

Yin Xiong,Xiuming Cui,Yupiao Hu,Lijuan Chen

doi:10.3389/fphar.2017.00745

Abstract

Although Panax notoginseng (PN) roots in raw and steamed forms were historically supposed to be different in the efficacies, the raw materials and steamed ones were often undifferentiated in the use and market circulation, which might bring unstable curative effects or even adverse reactions. To uncover chemical constituents responsible to different activities of raw and steamed PN, chemometrics analyses including partial least squares regression (PLSR) and multi-linear regression analysis (MLRA) were used to establish the relationships between the chromatographic fingerprints and activities of PN samples. Chemical fingerprints of PN were determined by HPLC. Anticoagulant and antioxidant activities were evaluated by the thromboplastin inhibiting test and hydroxyl radical scavenging assay, respectively. Results showed that there was a significant difference in the chemical composition between raw and steamed PN, which could be discriminated by principle component analysis according to different steaming temperatures. Compared with the steamed PN, raw PN exhibited stronger anticoagulation and weaker antioxidation. By chemometrics analyses, notoginsenoside R1, ginsenosides Rg1, Re, Rb1, and Rd were found to be the major active constituents of raw PN, whereas ginsenosides Rh1, Rk3, Rh4, and 20(R)-Rg3 had the key role in the activities of steamed PN, which could be used as new markers for the quality control (QC) of steamed PN.

Highlights

The processing of herbal medicines, including special crafts of steaming, baking, cooking, and other methods with liquid or solid supplementary materials, plays an important role in the application of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM)
We developed the HPLC chromatographic fingerprints of Panax notoginseng (PN) under different steaming conditions, and investigated the correlation between the activities and fingerprints of PN samples by using multivariate regression techniques including principal component analysis (PCA), partial least squares regression (PLSR), and multi-linear regression analysis (MLRA)
PCA is a classical technique to reduce the dimensionality of the data set by transforming to a new set of variables, named principal components (PCs) to summarize the features of the data

Summary

Introduction

The processing of herbal medicines, including special crafts of steaming, baking, cooking, and other methods with liquid or solid supplementary materials, plays an important role in the application of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). The purposes of processing include transforming the properties of medicines, strengthening the curative efficacy, generating new effects and reducing the toxicity or side-effects (Wang et al, 2012; Li et al, 2013). It has been found that the main mechanism underlying the property changes of herbs is mainly related to the alteration in the chemical composition and/or bioactivity of constituents in herbs Active Constituents of Panax notoginseng could be decomposed into less or non-toxic derivatives by boiling the raw materials at 100◦C for 8 h before drying it (Sun et al, 2012). The uses of raw and processed medicines cannot be mixed up for different curative or toxic effects

Methods

Results

Conclusion