Metabolomics-Driven Discovery of an Introduced Species and Two Malaysian Piper betle L. Variants

Abstract

The differences in pungency of “sirih” imply the probable occurrence of several variants of Piper betle L. in Malaysia. However, the metabolite profiles underlying the pungency of the different variants remain a subject of further research. The differences in metabolite profiles of selected Malaysian P. betle variants were thus investigated; specifically, the leaf aqueous methanolic extracts and essential oils were analyzed via 1H-NMR and GC-MS metabolomics, respectively. Principal component analysis (PCA) of the 1H-NMR spectral data showed quantitative differences in the metabolite profiles of “sirih melayu” and “sirih india” and revealed an ambiguous group of samples with low acetic acid content, which was identified as Piper rubro-venosum hort. ex Rodigas based on DNA sequences of the internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) region. The finding was supported by PCA of two GC-MS datasets of P. betle samples obtained from several states in Peninsular Malaysia, which displayed clustering of the samples into “sirih melayu” and “sirih india” groups. Higher abundance of chavicol acetate was consistently found to be characteristic of “sirih melayu”. The present research has provided preliminary evidence supporting the notion of occurrence of two P. betle variants in Malaysia based on chemical profiles, which may be related to the different genders of P. betle.

A systematic literature review on the forest health biomonitoring technique: A decade of practice, progress, and challenge

“…Macroinvertebrates are one of the most notable biological indicators for freshwater quality, especially for river ecosystems. However, there are a few studies such as Deborde et al (2016), Kim et al (2016), Brogna et al (2018), Foomani et al (2020), and Edegbene et al (2021) which have shown a significant relationship between forest health and river water quality. There are also studies that use other biological indicator distributions such as birds (Laiolo et al, 2011;Wade et al, 2013;Gnass Giese et al, 2015), nematodes (D'Errico et al, 2014;Nisa et al, 2021), amphibians (Jongsma et al, 2014), microorganisms (Hermans et al, 2020), fish (Gottesman et al, 2020) and mites (Meehan et al, 2019).…”

“…Aside from that, a large diversity of species in a forest indicates that the ecosystem service and function are optimum. According to Abas (2021), biodiversity is commonly acknowledged as the primary driving factor in ecosystem function. Numerous of studies have been conducted to investigate the impact of tree species variety on several forest ecosystem services, including primary production (Moradi et al, 2019).…”

“…The application of biomonitoring techniques for example species diversity and morphological observation, on the other hand, has been positive and has made its own contribution to forest management. Many studies have been conducted in the last decade (2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018)(2019)(2020)(2021), which use the biomonitoring techniques in assessing the forest health status. Therefore, this study aims to systematically review the forest health biomonitoring techniques in the last decade.…”