Secure and Sustainable Sourcing of Plant Tissues for the Exhaustive Exploration of Their Chemodiversity.

The main challenge of plant chemical diversity exploration is how to develop tools to study exhaustively plant tissues. Their sustainable sourcing is a limitation as bioguided strategies and dereplication need quite large amounts of plant material. We examine if alternative solutions could overcome these difficulties by obtaining a secure, sustainable, and scalable source of tissues able to biosynthesize an array of metabolites.

Unraveling Plant Natural Chemical Diversity for Drug Discovery Purposes.

The screening and testing of extracts against a variety of pharmacological targets in order to benefit from the immense natural chemical diversity is a concern in many laboratories worldwide. And several successes have been recorded in finding new actives in natural products, some of which have become new drugs or new sources of inspiration for drugs. But in view of the vast amount of research on the subject, it is surprising that not more drug candidates were found.

Degradation of rotenone in yam bean seeds ( Pachyrhizus sp.) through food processing.

The purpose of this research is to screen different processes that could potentially decrease or even eliminate rotenone, a toxic isoflavonoid, from Pachyrhizus seeds. Yam bean seeds have very interesting nutritional characteristics, especially their high protein and lipid contents, and could potentially increase food security in under-nourished populations. However, they contain rotenone, a natural molecule previously used as an insecticide inhibiting the respiratory mitochondrial chain.

Fast microwave-assisted extraction of rotenone for its quantification in seeds of yam bean (Pachyrhizus sp.).

The aim of this study was to find if fast microwave-assisted extraction could be an alternative to the conventional Soxhlet extraction for the quantification of rotenone in yam bean seeds by SPE and HPLC-UV. For this purpose, an experimental design was used to determine the optimal conditions of the microwave extraction. Then the values of the quantification on three accessions from two different species of yam bean seeds were compared using the two different kinds of extraction.

Updated biotechnological approaches developed for 2,7'-cyclolignan production1.

2,7'-Cyclolignans constitute a group of compounds regularly employed in clinical contexts due to their antiviral and anticancer properties as expressed in a number of already available designed drugs. Possibilities for other therapeutic developments are indicated. All commercial preparations actually originate from a single compound, podophyllotoxin, currently extracted from a few limited-in-abundance species of Podophyllum.