School of Pharmacy, Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom; Institute for Global Food Security, Advanced ASSET Centre, School of Biological Sciences, Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom.
Institute for Global Food Security, Advanced ASSET Centre, School of Biological Sciences, Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom.
Toxicol In Vitro. 2019 Apr;56:101-109. doi: 10.1016/j.tiv.2019.01.005. Epub 2019 Jan 11.
Global market of herbs has been struggling with food adulteration issues. A number of assays have been developed to aid the detection of the tampered samples and ensure high quality of the marketed products. However, herbs are marketed not only for their culinary applications but also as remedies due to high levels of biologically active constituents. Nevertheless, there is no information in the literature about the influence of herbs adulteration on the biological activity of the final product. Current study aims at assessing the influence of oregano adulteration on its in-vitro estrogen-like activity. High responses in a mammalian reporter gene assay have been detected in pure and adulterated samples, translating to 21-7409 ng of 17β-estradiol equivalents per gram of oregano. The origin of those responses was assessed by combining fractionation and UHPLC-HRMS. Three flavones were proposed as the most active extract constituents i.e. luteolin-glucoside, luteolin- and apigenin-glucuronides all of which have been previously identified in other herbal extracts with estrogenic activity. This study underlines challenges of biological activity assessment in complex herbal extracts as well as the need for further assessment of such supplement administrations in the case of postmenopausal women and breast cancer patients undergoing hormone therapy.
全球草药市场一直面临着食品掺假问题。已经开发了许多方法来帮助检测篡改的样品并确保市场产品的高质量。然而，草药不仅因其烹饪应用而销售，也因其具有高生物活性成分而作为药物销售。然而，关于草药掺假对最终产品生物活性的影响，文献中没有信息。本研究旨在评估牛至掺假对其体外雌激素样活性的影响。在纯品和掺假样品中均检测到哺乳动物报告基因测定中的高反应，相当于每克牛至含有 21-7409ng 的 17β-雌二醇当量。通过结合分级分离和 UHPLC-HRMS 评估了这些反应的来源。三种类黄酮被提出是最活跃的提取物成分，即木犀草素-葡萄糖苷、木犀草素和芹菜素-葡萄糖醛酸苷，它们都已在具有雌激素活性的其他草药提取物中被鉴定出来。这项研究强调了在复杂草药提取物中进行生物活性评估的挑战，以及在后绝经妇女和接受激素治疗的乳腺癌患者中对这类补充剂进行进一步评估的必要性。
