| Sedi Herba(Sedum sarmentosum Migo.), Herba Sedi Linearis (S. lineare Thunb.) and Sedi Emarginati Herba(S. emarginatum Migo.) are three widely used Chinese traditional or ethnic drugs originated from Sedum. Among them, fresh or dried whole plant of S. sarmentosum Migo. is one of the most frequently applied Chinese traditional drugs, which can clear damp-heat and eliminate toxins, and is also clinically employed for various kinds of hepatitis, jaundice, difficult urination, swollen ulcers and so on. As a raw material medicine of many single or compound preparations, Sedi Herba has already been recorded by several versions of Chinese Pharmacopoeia. Besides, Herba Sedi Linearis and Sedi Emarginati Herba, the relative plant medicines from the same genus, are often applied for heat-removement and detoxication, hemostasis, and wound healing promotion in the folk, and are also availed of to treat deversified inflammation, burn and scald, sore carbuncle and furunculosis, and so forth. Tujia Minority usually use the 3 plant medicines to cure of some cancers. As a result of the abundant resources and wide therapeutic effects of the 3 drugs, they deserve to be further studied, and certain development and application prospects have been shown.As the 3 medicinal plants and other related plants are very similar in macroscopic shape, some of them are easy to be confused with each other. At the same time, the relations between drug quality and some factors (such as habitat and especially collected period) are still not clearly understood. Moreover, their antitumor activity is not testified and the effective fractions are unknown yet. Thus, in this research, epidermal cell characteristics of several resembling species from Genus Sedum were observed; total flavonoids in 3 plant drugs collected in different seasons and habitats were determined; extraction and purification methods of total flavonoids in 3 plant drugs were compared; and the anti-tumor effects of each fraction of the drugs were also constrasted; so as to explore new methods to differ those easy-confused species, complement the quality control indexes on the basis of previous studies, verify the anti-tumour activity of the 3 plant drugs by experiments, and finally figure out the valid fractions.Microscopic identification research showed that morphological characteristics of epidermal cells were relatively stable within the same species while rather distinct among different species, and thus could serve as one of the most important references for identification. However, stomatal parameters such as stomatal index, stomatal density and length/width, were more influenced by habitat, which highly restricted the employment for classification.Through the comparative study of many samples of the 3 plant drugs harvested in different seasons and places, a remarkable relation was found between total flavonoid content and harvest season. The 3 plant medicines all contained the most flavonoids in April (flowering period), and then the flavonoid quantites kept decreasing from April to June or July. However, the content of Sedi Herba and Herba Sedi Linearis began to rise a little after August, while that of Sedi Emarginati Herba continued to drop during autumn. Considerating the flavonoids as the effective components, it seemed that all the 3 plant drugs produced in Hubei Province should have the best quality if reaped in flowering time, and samples collected in the west of Hubei Province usually possessed higher quality than those collected in the east. The method established was simple and fast, having enriched the approaches for the quality evaluation.Study on total flavonoid purification methods of 3 Sedum plant drugs revealed that alkali-solution and acid-isolation method was simple but with a low flavonoid content in the extraction; while the coupling technique of macroporous resin and polyamide absorption column, which could give full play to the advantages of the both, showed a good concentration effect. By this way, the flavonoid content of the extractions of Sedi Herba, Herba Sedi Linearis and Sedi Emarginati Herba respectively reached 68.9%, 54.0% and 51.5%.MTT method was applied to detect the inhibition effects of the extractions of ethyl acetate, n-butyl and total flavonoids of the 3 Sedum plant drugs against HepG2, EC109 and SW480. The results indicated that ethyl acetate and n-butyl fractions possessed certain antitumour effectiveness, while the total flavonoid extractions of each drug had the strongest effectiveness. The sequence of the antineoplastic bioactivity of the 3 extrations was: total flavonoid extraction > ethyl acetate extraction > n-butyl extraction. So it was reasonable to deduce that flavonoids should be the dominating active compositions in Sedi Herba, Herba Sedi Linearis and Sedi Emarginati Herba, which had layed a foundation to explore novel, efficient and safe antitumour medicines.The research results above provided significant references and experimental details for identification, quality evaluation, as well as further study, application and popularization of the 3 Sedum plant drugs. The results also played a role in the development of new antitutmour medicines. |
PDF Full Text Request