Preliminary updating on structural and chemotaxonomical aspects of pharmacologically evaluated flavonoids

This communication presents a preliminary update on pharmacologically evaluated flavonoids under several aspects including: structure-structure associations, structure-activity trends and structure-plant affiliations. Although pharmacological evaluations are continuously performed on secondary metabolites, a small fraction of published (elucidated) molecules were revealed to be concerned with lab testing. This resulted in strongly sparse information in literature that did not favor integrative work in this field. While sparse data don’t favor intensive analysis of well target system (e.g. a given pharmacological activity of a given metabolic family associated with a given plant taxon), big sets of cumulated data from many origins provide alternative way for extensive analysis helping to highlight backbone information on a target biochemical system. This principle was applied to highlight different structural, functional and chemotaxonomical aspects of pharmacologically evaluated flavonoids from 285 molecules belonging to different flavonoid families and originated from different plant taxa. (i) Significant variations of relative frequencies of different chemical groups (OH, OCH₃, glycosyls, prenyl) in different flavonoid aglycone (structure-structure associations). (ii) Clear structural differentiation ways of different plant families characterized by relatively high frequencies of some aglycones and chemical groups. (iii) Positive and negative effects of some chemical groups (occurring in some carbons of aglycones) on some pharmacological activities. Anti-inflammatory (If) and antidiabetic (Db) activities were considered because of more available data. The work calls for further investigations in pharmacological evaluations of flavonoids. It is openly ready for further updates by considering more biologically evaluated flavonoids as they are published.