Abstract
Background and Objective: Medicinal herbs offer an important traditional way to prevent and cure several diseases such as cardiovascular disease, chronic inflammation and cancer as they contain bioactive compounds including those with antioxidant, immunomodulatory and anticancer activities. The purpose of this study was to determine biological activities of organics from hot water extracts of medicinal herbs and to obtain the correlation of activities with polyphenol contents. Materials and Methods: In this study, 16 herbs were selected based on their traditional medicinal uses and obtained their hot water extracts. Ethanol soluble organic molecules were separated from these extracts and their antioxidant, immunomodulatory and anticancer activities were assessed. Antioxidant activities were evaluated using DPPHC, ABTSC+ scavenging methods and ferric ion reducing assay. Total phenolic and total flavonoid contents of these extracts were estimated based on the Folin-Ciocalteu and aluminium chloride colorimetric methods. The immunomodulatory properties of the herbs were determined on the basis of their ability to inhibit NO and TNF-" production in LPS induced RAW 264.7 macrophages. Cell viabilities were determined using MTT assay. The anticancer activities were measured against five human cancer cell lines. All data was analysed using one-way ANOVA and Duncan’s multiple range methods. Results: Organic molecules extracted from Alpinae officinarum (A. officinarum), Artemisia annua , Cynanchum paniculatum , Lobelia chinensis (L. chinensis), Spatholobus suberectus (S. suberectus ), Xanthium sibiricum and Amauroderma rugosum (A. rugosum ) have exhibited significant antioxidant activities and considerably inhibited the production of NO and TNF-". Seven herbal extracts out of sixteen herbs studied showed highly significant anticancer activity against MCF7. The extract from Rabdosia rubescens displayed significant anticancer activities against three cancer cell lines. Observed biological activities of the extracts showed good correlation with their flavonoid contents. Conclusion: Extracts from Akebia quinata , A. officinarum, Artemisia scoparia , L. chinensis, S. suberectus and A. rugosum exhibited significant biological activities with large quantities of polyphenols. These herbs are potential candidates for the isolation of novel anticancer agents.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 59-72 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Pharmacologia |
Volume | 8 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2017 |
Open Access - Access Right Statement
© 2017 Lin Zhang et al . This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Keywords
- antioxidants
- bioactive compounds
- herbs
- medicine, Chinese
- polyphenols
- therapeutic use