Bioactive Secondary Metabolites from Gleditsia caspica Desf. Family Fabaceae

Abstract

Natural products are chemical compounds biosynthesized in living organisms; plants, animals, protists, fungi, Archaebacteria and Eubacteria (Breinbauer et al. 2002). Traditional natural drugs have been used for thousands of years in the treatment of different diseases ranging from colds to parasitic infections (Newman et al. 2000). Many microbial natural products were released to market without any chemical modification, which proves that microorganisms produce small drug like molecules, a characteristic that distinguishes natural products from other chemically diverse sources (Demain and Zhang 2005). Family Fabaceae or Leguminosae; commonly known as pea, bean or the legume family, is a large and economically important family of flowering plants. It is the third largest plant family in species number, after Orchidaceae and Asteraceae (Sayyah et al. 2011). Genus Gleditsia belongs to family Fabaceae and comprises around 14 species. The majority of Gleditsia species are found in Eastern Asia, Southern Caucasus, North and South America (Schnabel et al. 2003). Ethnopharmacological survey on members of genus Gleditsia revealed that they have been widely used in the treatment of various inflammatory diseases. Many species have been used to treat productive cough, asthma, diarrhea, suppuration, headache, apoplexy, carbuncle, swelling and scabies (Li 1982; Zhang et al. 2016). Previous phytochemical studies demonstrated the richness of Gleditsia species with phytoconstituents especially sterols (Lim et al. 2005), triterpenes (Zhang et al. 1999a; Lim et al. 2005; Li et al. 2007), phenolics (Zhou et al. 2007a; Zhou et al. 2007b), alkaloids (Kajimoto et al. 2010a; Lee et al. 2014) and saponins (Konoshima et al. 1995; Zhang et al. 1999b) as the most characteristic constituents of the fruits and thorns, Gleditsia triacanthos was the only species whose leaves were studied and revealed the presence of flavonoids and the alkaloid triacanthine (Belikov et al. 1954; Mohammed et al. 2014; Duchenko et al. 2016). Plants belonging genus Gleditsia possessed a variety of biological activities such as anti-inflammatory (Ha et al. 2008), cytotoxic (Yu et al. 2015; Yin et al. 2016; Yu et al. 2019)