Amomum tsaoko is a perennial herb belonging to Zingiberaceae. Its dried ripe fruit is an important food additive, spice and materia medicai in Southeast Asia. For hundreds of years of cultivation, morphological variations have existed. The essential oil is one of the major active products of the A. tsaoko fruit and seed. In this study, we collected 12 populations in Yunnan province, and the correlation analysis of compounds was focused on the essential oil of A. tsaoko seed and its fruit morphological characteristics, geographical conditions, and locality of growth. The results showed that the difference in morphological characteristics between populations is greater than the difference within the population. High altitude areas are beneficial for biomass accumulation. Another interesting finding is that selecting specific functional or odor type materials could reference the morphologies of A. tsaoko fruit and seed. Furthermore, the qualitative and quantitative analysis of compounds in essential oil could be used to distinguish the producing area of the A. tsaoko fruit. These results are crucial in realizing the determination of botanical origin and evaluating the quality of A. tsaoko fruit. Meanwhile, it makes clear that various other studies on this plant deserve more attention.
Background Exposure-response studies and policy evaluations of household air pollution (HAP) are limited by current methods of exposure assessment which are expensive and burdensome to participants. Methods We collected 152 dried blood spot (DBS) specimens during the heating and non-heating seasons from 53 women who regularly used biomass-burning stoves for cooking and heating. Participants were enrolled in a longitudinal study in China. Untargeted metabolic phenotyping of DBS were generated using ultra-high performance liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry to exemplify measurement precision and assessment for feasibility to detect exposure to HAP, evaluated by season (high pollution vs. low pollution) and measured personal exposure to fine particulate matter <2.5 μm diameters (PM 2.5) and black carbon (BC) in the 48-h prior to collecting the DBS specimen. Results Metabolites e.g., amino acids, acyl-carnitines, lyso-phosphorylcholines, sphinganine, and choline were detected in the DBS specimens. Our approach is capable of detecting the differences in personal exposure to HAP whilst showing high analytical reproducibility, coefficient of variance (CV) <15%, meeting the U.S. Food and Drug Administration criteria. Conclusions Our results provide a proof of principle that high-resolution metabolic phenotypic data can be generated using a simple DBS extraction method thus suitable for exposure studies in remote, low-resource settings where the collection of serum and plasma is logistically challenging or infeasible. The analytical run time (19 min/specimen) is similar to most global phenotyping methods and therefore suitable for large-scale application. Keywords Dried blood spot • Exposome • Metabonomics/metabolomics/metabolic phenotyping • Molecular epidemiological study • Biomass-related air pollution • PM 2.5
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