Abstract
Flavonoids are ubiquitous plant metabolites with a lot of purported pharmacological properties. Emergence of advanced analytical instrumentations such as liquid chromatography hyphenated to mass spectrometry (LC–MS) has allowed for unparallel elucidation of chemical compositions of various plants. Through such analyses, various chemical modifications such as glycosylation and other forms of isomerization have been shown to be an evolutionary strategy of plants to diversify their metabolite compositions (metabolome). Herein, metabolite fingerprinting of two closely related plant species vis Coccinia grandis and Coccinia rehmannii revealed that flavonoids attached to either di- or tri-saccharides are prone to isomerization, a phenomenon termed glycoisomerization herein. Furthermore, modification known as sugar acylation by known biologically active metabolites such as derivatives of cinnamic acids (i. e., caffeic acid and coumaric acid) has been noted in C. rehmannii but not in C. grandis. The findings of the current study reveal glycosylation patterns of flavonoids as an evolutionary strategy used by plants to diversify its metabolome, a phenomenon of which the biological consequence is still to be investigated.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Dr K Magwede for guidance and assistance in the collection Coccinia plants. Thanks, are also given to CSIR and the University of Johannesburg, for analysis of samples by LC–MS. This work was supported by funding from National Research Foundations (Thuthuka research grant). Lastly, the authors would like to give thanks to the University of Venda for its support.
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Nengovhela, N., Steenkamp, P. & Madala, N.E. LC-MS Based Metabolite Fingerprinting of Coccinia Plants Reveals Glycoisomerization as a Structual Diversification Strategy in Flavanoid Chemical Space. Natl. Acad. Sci. Lett. 44, 209–213 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40009-020-00990-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40009-020-00990-4