Tropical Journal of Pharmaceutical Research

Review Article | OPEN ACCESS

Ethnobotanical, phytochemical and pharmacological aspects of Daphne mucronata (Thymeleaceae)

Asma Zaidi¹ , Syed Majid Bukhari¹, Farhan A Khan¹, Tayyaba Noor², Naseem Iqbal³

¹Department of Chemistry, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Abbottabad-22060, KPK; ²School of Chemical and Material Engineering; ³USAID Funded Center for Advanced Studies in Energy at NUST, National University of Science and Technology, Islamabad-44000, Pakistan.

For correspondence:- Asma Zaidi Email: asmazaidi@ciit.net.pk Tel:+92337716 9261

Received: 4 March 2015 Accepted: 26 June 2015 Published: 30 August 2015

Citation: Zaidi A, Bukhari SM, Khan FA, Noor T, Iqbal N. Ethnobotanical, phytochemical and pharmacological aspects of Daphne mucronata (Thymeleaceae). Trop J Pharm Res 2015; 14(8):1517-1523 doi: 10.4314/tjpr.v14i8.27

© 2015 The authors.
This is an Open Access article that uses a funding model which does not charge readers or their institutions for access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) and the Budapest Open Access Initiative (http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read), which permit unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited..

Abstract

Daphne mucronata is a shrub well known as a medicinal plant in different regions of Asia. Ethnobotanical, phytochemical and pharmacological studies have revealed strong anti-cancer potential of the plant. Literature reports the evaluation of the initial bioactivity profile and extraction of the plant followed by different chromatographic techniques to obtain fractions. As an outcome, isolation and identification of coumarins, flavonoids, triterpenoids, lignin cumarinolignans, glucosides, daphnecin, aquillochin, daphnine and umbelliferone from the plant have been reported. Of these compounds, a diterpene, named gnidilatimonoein, has shown promising anticancer potency in in vitro tests on various cancer cell lines. This review article is an effort to summarize literature published in recent years on the bioactivity of Daphne mucronata.

Keywords: Thymelaeaceae, Daphne mucronata, Diterpene, Gnidilatimonoein, Anti-cancer, Bioactivity