Phylogenetics of psychoactive plants in neuro-targeted bioprospecting 24852989

Ethnodirected bioprospecting approaches utilize traditional knowledge in the process of selecting plants to screen for desired properties. The relatively recent application of phylogenetic methods in ethnodirected bioprospecting proposes incorporating phylogenetic information as a predictive tool and it is seeing an increasing interest with promising preliminary results [1 – 3]. Novel discoveries of plant bioactivity from such approaches can provide important steps in the development of treatments for many of our most pressing diseases, one group being the escalating mental and neurological disorders. Psychoactive plants may provide botanical sources of neurologically relevant bioactivity However, no systematic studies have explored the diversity and phylogenetic distribution of psychoactive plants. In this study, we compiled a database of 501 psychoactive plant species and their properties (chemistry, neuroactivity and cognitive effects) from published sources [4 – 7]. We map this information on a phylogenetic tree of all land plant genera and show that the phylogenetic distributions of psychoactive genera and several properties of psychoactive chemistry, neuroactivity and cognitive effects, are phylogenetically clustered. We used the D metric[8] to quantify phylogenetic clustering of psychoactive genera and specific properties of psychocativity, namely serotonergic and cholinergic neurotransmitter system influence as well as specific cholinergic receptor behaviour; nicotinic agonists and muscarinic antagonists. We found a significantly nonrandom phylogenetic distribution of psychoactive genera in land plants (D = 0.846, p(D = 1)< 0.001). Likewise, we found significantly nonrandom distributions of serotonergic, cholinergic and nicotinic agonistic genera (D = 0.656, D = 0.680, and D = 0.781 respectively, p(D = 1)< 0.001) and a significantly clustered distribution of muscarinic antagonists (D = 0.455, p(D = 0)= 0.139). Furthermore we performed socalled hot node analyses and identified specific lineages with psychoactive property overabundances. Our results suggest that certain plant lineages show overabundance of certain psychoactive properties, showcasing the potential of using the psychoactive plants in neuro-targeted bioprospecting.

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the Marie Curie Actions of the 7th European Community Framework Programme FP7/2007 – 2013/: PIEF-GA-2012 – 328637-BiodiversityAltitude and REA grant agreement n° 606895-MedPlant. We would like to thank Nina Rønsted for fruitful discussions on this study.

Keywords: Bioprospecting, ethnobotany, phylogeny, prediction, psychoactive plants.

References:

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