Metabolites In Medicinal Plants Research Articles

Systems biology applications to explore secondary metabolitesin medicinal plants

Secondary metabolites are produced during the growth and development of plants along with the adaptation of outer environment, as a rule they are the main active ingredients in medicinal plants and ensure the quality of crude drugs. Since biogenesis is quite complex, the production and accumulation of secondary metabolites are influenced by various biotic and abiotic factors either from gene or environments, the complexity may affect quality control of crude drugs and utilization of the active ingredients. The thought and approach adopted in systems biology is a powerful tool to explore biology fully, along with the development of modern molecular biology and information biology, omics integration like genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics will bring new opportunities for the study of secondary metabolites of medicinal plant. It has great significance to apply this holistic and systematic method in researches on biosynthetic pathway, signal transduction, ecological environment and metabolic engineering of the formation of the secondary metabolites of medicinal plants, and in building secondary metabolite biosynthesis gene expression and regulation system model, in order to explain the origin of the active ingredients of medicinal plants, formation mechanism of the Chinese herbs, metabolic engineering effecting active ingredients of medicinal plants, and the rational exploitation and utilization of resources of medicinal plants systematically.

Potential Implications of Medicinal Plant Production in Controlled Environments: The case of Feverfew (Tanacetum parthenium)

The purpose of this review is to promote a discussion about the potential implications of herb production in controlled environments, focusing on our recent works conducted with feverfew. Research suggests that the content of secondary metabolites in medicinal plants fluctuates with changing environmental conditions. Our studies with feverfew (Tanacetum parthenium [L.] Schultz-Bip., Asteraceae) lend support to this hypothesis. Feverfew plants exposed to different water and light conditions immediately before harvest exhibited changes in content of some secondary metabolites. The highest yield of parthenolide (PRT) was in plants that received reduced-water regimes. Phenolics concentration however, was higher in plants receiving daily watering. Light immediately before harvest enhanced accumulation of PRT, but reduced the phenolic content. Notably, PRT decreased at night whereas total phenolics decreased during the photoperiod and increased at night. PRT also increased with increased plant spacing. UV light supplementation increased PRT only in plants that had undergone water stress, whereas phenolics increased when UV was applied to continuosly watered plants. Clearly, production of medicinal plants under greenhouse conditions is a promising method for controlling levels of phytochemicals through manipulation of light and water as discussed here, and possibly other environmental factors such as temperature and daylength. However, better understanding of how the environment alter secondary metabolite levels is needed as it was revealed that manipulating the environment to favor increased accumulation of one group of phytochemicals could result in a decline of other key metabolites.