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Panax ginseng (Chinese ginseng) is precious traditional Chinese medicine in China, which is commonly used to treat central nervous system diseases, cardiovascular diseases, endocrine system diseases, cancer and other diseases. Due to its excellent medicinal properties, it is widely used in East Asia (Korea, China and Japan) as herbal medicine and also known as the king of medicinal herbs. This paper reviews the origin and distribution of ginseng in China, different cultivation methods, economic significance of ginseng industry and allelopathy research on ginseng. This paper also describes the economic importance of ginseng in medical and other uses, and suggests future research areas of ginseng. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese yam (Dioscorea polystachya Turczaninow) is widely cultivated in East Asia, whose edible stem is a common vegetable and herb in traditional Chinese medicine. In fruit and vegetable processing, browning is estimated to be a major reason of waste. Browning lowers the nutrition value and brings undesired characteristics in food processing. To develop a secure and low-cost browning inhibiting protocol in yam processing, different thermal treatment conditions and color protectants were tested for their color-protecting ability. Color difference ΔE was calculated to evaluate the browning with a colorimeter. To ensure that the color-protecting treatment does not influence the quality of yam, texture properties and nutrition compositions were quantified. The optimal treatment is as follows: deactivate yam in water bath of 60°C for 10 min and then incubate in 2 g/L citric acid and 1 g/L ascorbic acid for 1 hour. The treatment led to significant decrease of the color difference, with no obvious changes in the texture properties and nutrition value. To summarize, this research provides an ideal color-protecting solution in yam processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an important branch of medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has been applied for the treatment of diseases for thousands of years in China and other countries in East Asia. The Chinese Pharmacopoeia (ChP) is a drug code formulated by the Chinese government, and it includes a special volume for the monographs of TCM, which plays an important role in ensuring the quality of drugs. The use of quality control technology has always been a complex and important factor in TCM. Owing to the chemical diversity of TCM, chromatography technology has been proven to be a comprehensive strategy for the assessment of the overall quality of TCM and has become the main analytical method in the ChP. This article provides an overview of the classical and modern chromatographic technologies applied in the ChP, and summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of each technique in the TCM monographs. In 2020, the new edition of the ChP (the 2020 edition) has been implemented at the end of 2020. This paper also contains a brief introduction about the application of chromatographic technologies in the new edition of the ChP. [Display omitted] • An overview of the classical and modern chromatographic technologies applied in the ChP. • A discussion of the reason why each chromatographic technologies was chosen in the quality control of TCM. • Introduction of the chromatographic technologies applied in the 2020 edition of ChP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poaching for the illegal wildlife trade is the most direct threat to the persistence of Amur tigers. Despite the recognition that reducing poaching is necessary to prevent extinction, the motivations that drive this activity are not well understood. Understanding this behavior is the first critical step to implementing tangible policy solutions. This study utilizes ethnographic methods to gather empirical evidence about the motivations associated with the poaching and trafficking of Amur tigers in the Russian Far East. By conducting interviews with those directly involved in the illegal tiger trade, three main motivations are identified: status and impunity, poverty (both economic and cultural/traditional poverty), and human/tiger conflict. Economic factors, due to the value of tiger parts for traditional medicine in China, is by far the largest influence on poaching in Russia. It is facilitated and exacerbated by systemic structural inequalities between social classes, including unequal distribution of power and resources and embedded corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plant-derived nature products, known as herb formulas, have been commonly used in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) for disease prevention and treatment. The herbs have been traditionally classified into different categories according to the TCM Organ systems known as Meridians. Despite the increasing knowledge on the active components of the herbs, the rationale of Meridian classification remains poorly understood. In this study, we took a machine learning approach to explore the classification of Meridian. We determined the molecule features for 646 herbs and their active components including structure-based fingerprints and ADME properties (absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion), and found that the Meridian can be predicted by machine learning approaches with a top accuracy of 0.83. We also identified the top compound features that were important for the Meridian prediction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that molecular properties of the herb compounds are associated with the TCM Meridians. Taken together, the machine learning approach may provide novel insights for the understanding of molecular evidence of Meridians in TCM. Author summary: In East Asia, plant-derived natural products, known as herb formulas, have been commonly used as Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) for disease prevention and treatment. According to the theory of TCM, herbs can be classified as different Meridians according to the balance of Yin and Yang, which are commonly understood as metaphysical concepts. Therefore, the scientific rational of Meridian classification remains poorly understood. The aim of our study was to provide a computational means to understand the classification of Meridians. We showed that the Meridians of herbs can be predicted by the molecular and chemical features of the ingredient compounds, suggesting that the Meridians indeed are associated with the properties of the compounds. Our work provided a novel chemoinformatics approach which may lead to a more systematic strategy to identify the mechanisms of action and active compounds for TCM herbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paulownia tomentosa (Thunb.) Steud. is a medicinal plant with a very long established and considerable position in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and in those of the other Far East Asian countries (mainly in Vietnam, Laos, Japan, and Korea). In Europe, Americas and Australia, P. tomentosa is known as princess tree, empress tree, or foxglove tree, and it is cultivated as a beautifully blossoming ornamental tree. In TCM, all parts of P. tomentosa (i.e., timber, bark, leaves, flowers and fruits) are used for curative purposes. From a literature survey, a conclusion can be drawn that in phytochemical and ethnopharmaceutical studies relatively less attention has been paid to investigating the chemical composition and biological activity of the leaves than that of the other parts of this medicinal plant and for this reason, our research was focused on antibacterial properties of the phenolics extracted from the P. tomentosa leaves. There are two important novelties of our approach. One novelty is that the phenolics extract from the P. tomentosa leaves was fractionated into six fractions (I–VI, expectedly containing flavonoid aglycons, free phenolic acids, non-polar flavonoid glycosides, polar flavonoid glycosides and phenolic acids liberated by the acidic and basic hydrolysis, respectively). The other novelty is that antibacterial assay was performed for each isolated fraction with the use of high-performance thin-layer chromatography combined with direct bioautography (HPTLC-DB). The best separations were obtained for fractions I and II, somewhat worse separations were obtained for fractions III–V, and the lack of characteristic bands was observed with fraction VI. In the antibacterial assay performed upon the HPTLC fingerprints, the Gram positive Bacillus subtilis and the Gram negative Aliivibrio fischeri bacteria were used. Well pronounced antibacterial activity was established with the selected fingerprint zones derived from fractions I–IV, whereas a lack of antibacterial activity was observed with fractions V and VI. Identification of apigenin and p-coumaric acid in the chromatographic zones from fractions I and II was performed with use of HPTLC and HPLC-DAD-MS, aided by external standards. Fractions III and IV were found to have similar chromatographic patterns, which suggests the presence of semi-polar flavonoid sugar conjugates in the P. tomentosa leaves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]