Lichen: A Potential Anticancer Officinal Resource
Many natural products, which derived from plants, animals, and microorganisms, have been isolated as bioactive compounds with great therapeutic potential for cancer, but as a fungus, lichen has long been neglected in this area. The special symbiotic form
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Lichen: A Potential Anticancer Officinal Resource Meirong Ren, Xinli Wei and Feng Xu
Abstract Many natural products, which derived from plants, animals, and microorganisms, have been isolated as bioactive compounds with great therapeutic potential for cancer, but as a fungus, lichen has long been neglected in this area. The special symbiotic form of fungi and algae and worldwide distribution even extreme habitat of lichen contribute to its biological and chemical diversity, so, lichen becomes an amazing resource for the discovery of new anticancer drugs. The aim of this review is to show the value of lichen as a potential resource of anticancer drugs, especially highlight several lichen metabolisms and their derivatives, which can show the potentials to inhibit cellular proliferation or cytotoxicity and trigger apoptosis of cancer cells. To identify the new lead-compounds from lichen and elucidate the active principles with therapeutic potential for cancer, it is essential to establish a high-throughput screening program and dedicated collaboration among lichenologists, chemists, pharmacologists, and biologists. Keywords Anticancer
Cytotoxicity Lichen Secondary metabolisms
M. Ren (&) College of Life Science, Southwest Forestry University, Kunming 650224, People’s Republic of China e-mail: [email protected] F. Xu HeBei ZhiTong Biological Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd, Baoding 072656, People’s Republic of China X. Wei (&) State Key Laboratory of Mycology, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, People’s Republic of China e-mail: [email protected]
T.-C. Zhang et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Applied Biotechnology (ICAB 2012), Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering 250, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-37922-2_80, Ó Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
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80.1 Introduction Cancer is a class of disease characterized by out-of-control cell growth. It is a major health problem in the world, which is the second most common cause of death disease for all ages [1]. The number of new cancer cases diagnosed has been increasing steadily in recent decades, while the mortality of cancer patients is decreasing. Earlier diagnosis and various treatments, especially chemotherapy, have improved cure rates for malignancy and reduced risk of death. Natural products and their derivatives, especially those from plants, animal, and microorganisms, have long been a traditional source of drug which contributes not less than 60 % drugs. Some of them, such as vinca alkaloid, vincristine, taxol, fumiquinazolines, and rebeccamycin, etc. [2–4], show the strong anticancer activity. Lichens are a unique life form of symbiosis composed of fungi and algae and or cyanobacteria. As pioneers, lichens show a worldwide distribution even various extreme environmental conditions which were unfavorable to the survival of the individual partners, from arctic to tropical regions, and from the plains to the highest mountains (approximately 8 % of terrestrial ecosystems are
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