Medicinal Plant Centipeda Minima: A Resource of Bioactive Compounds

Background: Centipeda minima (the family Asteraceae) is an annual herbaceous plant native to the tropical regions, especially in eastern tropical Asia. C. minima is well-known in the list of medicinal plants with capacities in treatment of whooping cough, nasal allergy, malaria, and asthma. More than sixty reports on phytochemical and pharmacological aspects of this plant are now available, but a supportive review is insufficient.

Objective: The current review aims to make a compilation of almost of isolated compounds from the title plant together with their pharmacological activities.

Methodology: Centipeda minima is the meaningful keyword to search for previous references, while the reliable databases such as Sci-Finder, Google Scholar, Pub Med, Science Direct, the Web of Science, Scopus, Bentham science, Taylor Francis, Springer, IOP Science have been utilized at most.

Conclusion: More than one hundred secondary metabolites, classifying as terpenoids, flavonoids, mono-phenols, fatty acids, amides, and other types, were isolated from this plant. Among them, sesquiterpene lactones are dominant in either C. minima species or numerous plants of genus Centipeda. These phytochemical groups also possessed various biological results like anti-cancer, anti-bacteria, anti-allergy, antivirus, anti-inflammation, hepatoprotective activities. With many kinds of bioactive results such as anti-cancer, antiinflammation, the use of C. minima plant extracts and isolated compounds for drug development seems to be a futuristic strategy.

Keywords: Asteraceae; Centipeda minima; pharmacology.; phytochemistry; secondary metabolites; sesquiterpene lactones.