Barra Andrea
Department of Toxicology, The School of Pharmacy, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy.
Nat Prod Commun. 2009 Aug;4(8):1147-54.
This review, covering mainly papers of the last decade, focuses on recent findings on the different factors affecting the chemical composition of essential oils, such as exogenous and endogenous factors. The endogenous factors are related to anatomical and physiological characteristics of the plants and to the biosynthetic pathways of the volatiles, which might change in either the different tissues of the plants or in different seasons, but also could be influenced by DNA adaptation. The exogenous factors, over a long period, might affect some of the genes responsible for volatiles formation. Those factors lead to ecotypes or chemotypes in the same plant species. In the last few years chemotaxonomy has been widely used to classify plants with essential oils characterized by intra-specific chemical polymorphism. It could be evidenced that chemotypes are frequently genotypes and recently the application of the Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) markers, coupled with powerful statistical methods, appeared to be useful in discriminating the different genotypes. The data presented led to the suggestion that further chemotaxonomic studies should be the result of the analysis of morphological traits combined both with chemical and molecular markers.
本综述主要涵盖过去十年的论文，重点关注影响精油化学成分的不同因素的最新研究结果，如外源因素和内源因素。内源因素与植物的解剖学和生理学特征以及挥发物的生物合成途径有关，这些在植物的不同组织或不同季节可能会发生变化，而且还可能受到DNA适应性的影响。长期来看，外源因素可能会影响一些负责挥发物形成的基因。这些因素导致同一植物物种出现生态型或化学型。在过去几年中，化学分类学已被广泛用于对具有种内化学多态性特征的含精油植物进行分类。可以证明，化学型通常就是基因型，最近随机扩增多态性DNA（RAPD）标记与强大的统计方法相结合，似乎有助于区分不同的基因型。所呈现的数据表明，进一步的化学分类学研究应该是形态特征分析与化学和分子标记相结合的结果。
