Hypotensive Veratrum Ester Alkaloids

Medicinal history of North American Veratrum

“…V. viride spans a large variety of habitats from wet woods and moist coastal regions in Alaska and Quebec to mountain meadows in northern California, Idaho, Montana, and North Carolina. As is to be expected with such a widespread species, local morphological variations exist, but V. viride generally feature green perianths (Kupchan 1961). …”

“…Indeed, it is quite difficult to categorize Veratrum species purely on morphological features as these can exhibit distinct local variation, with different species grading into one another geographically (for example, V. oxysepalum and V. grandiflorum , members of the genetically assigned V. album complex, have been traditionally defined along an arbitrary north/south division in Japan and Korea, see Kupchan 1961 and Zomlefer et al 2003). In deciding which North American species to include and discuss, we have relied on Dr. Wendy Zomlefer’s 2003 phylogenetic analysis of Veratrum in addition to the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) PLANTS database (Zomlefer et al 2003; USDA NRCS 2013).…”

“…Veratrum viride (green false hellebore) has a discontinuous geographical distribution, growing throughout eastern North America, from Quebec to Georgia, and is also found across the western margin of the continent from Alaska to California and inward to the mountainous regions of Montana, Idaho, and Alberta (Kupchan 1961; Zomlefer et al 2003; USDA NRCS 2013). The species has been divided into two subspecies based on the east/west distribution (the western variety of V. viride was formerly considered the separate species V. eschoscholtzii ; any data specific to this species will be grouped with V. viride for the purposes of this review) and may or may not be a variant that should be grouped in the V. album complex (Youngken 1952, 1953; Kupchan 1961; Zomlefer et al 2003; USDA NRCS 2013).…”

“…The species has been divided into two subspecies based on the east/west distribution (the western variety of V. viride was formerly considered the separate species V. eschoscholtzii ; any data specific to this species will be grouped with V. viride for the purposes of this review) and may or may not be a variant that should be grouped in the V. album complex (Youngken 1952, 1953; Kupchan 1961; Zomlefer et al 2003; USDA NRCS 2013). V. viride spans a large variety of habitats from wet woods and moist coastal regions in Alaska and Quebec to mountain meadows in northern California, Idaho, Montana, and North Carolina.…”

“…Over the past century investigators have uncovered more than 100 distinct steroidal alkaloids in Veratrum plants (see reviews by Kupchan 1961; Tomko and Votický 1973; Atta-ur-Rahman and Choudhary 1998; Li et al 2006), some of which are potent bioactives. This review focuses only on the species of Veratrum found in North America with an emphasis on the various bioactive steroidal alkaloids they contain.…”