Among latex-producing plants, mainly the latex of Hevea brasiliensis has been studied in detail so far, while comprehensive comparative studies of latex coagulation mechanisms among the more than 20,000 latex-bearing plant species are lacking. In order to give new insights into the potential variety of coagulation mechanisms, the untreated natural latices of five latex-bearing plants from the f...

Platycodon grandiflorum A. DC (Campanulaceae) is a traditional medicinal plant. Its root, Platycodi Radix, contains an abundant amount of saponin glycosides, platycodins, of which platycodin D is one of the major components. The chemical structures of platycodins can be modified by various types of chemical processing, but a modification mediated with microorganisms has been not reported yet. I...

The breakpoint phylogeny is an optimization problem proposed by Blanchette et al. for reconstructing evolutionary trees from gene order data. These same authors also developed and implemented BPAnalysis [3], a heuristic method (based upon solving many instances of the travelling salesman problem) for estimating the breakpoint phylogeny. We present a new heuristic for this purpose; although not ...

In this study, we aimed to examine the cellular and molecular mechanisms of lancemaside A from Codonopsis lanceolata (Campanulaceae) in the inflammatory responses of monocytes (U937 cells) and macrophages (RAW264.7 cells). Lancemaside A significantly suppressed the inflammatory functions of lipopolysaccharide- (LPS-) treated RAW264.7 cells by suppressing the production of nitric oxide (NO), the...