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Abstract: Rhododendron decorum is widely distributed shrub in southwest China, and its flower is a favorite food of the local people. To investigate the impacts of harvesting, we genotyped 8 nuclear microsatellite loci in a total of 247 individuals from 10 natural populations and 4 flower-harvesting populations. No significant differences in allelic richness, effective number of alleles, private allelic richness, heterozygosity and effective population size were found among the natural and flower-harvesting populations. Differentiation between the 14 populations is relatively low (F ST = 0.107). R. decorum showed high levels of intra-population genetic diversity. AMOVA analysis indicated that over 89% of the variation was contained within the populations, and that only 0.47% of the variation was attributed by human harvesting practices. Cluster analysis revealed two basic clusters related to the plants' geographical locations. Our results indicate that historical flower-harvesting practices do not lead to loss of genetic variation in R. decorum. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Six flavonoids, diosmetin (1), apigenin (2), luteolin (3), chrysoeriol (4), apigenin-7-O-glucuronide (5) and acacetin (6), two caffeic acid sugar esters, verbascoside (7) and isoverbascoside (8), as well as one norsesquiterpene, blumenol A (9) were isolated or detected from the EtOAc and n-BuOH extract of the whole plants of Striga asiatica. Their structures were identified by 1H &13C NMR, HR-LC-TOF-MS and co-injection with the reference standards. Among them, blumenol A (9) was firstly found from the Scrophulariaceae. Diosmetin (1) and isoverbascoside (8) were firstly reported from the genus Striga, while verbascoside (7) was reported from this plant for the first time. Based on our chemotaxonomic studies and the previous phytochemical studies on Scrophulariaceae, Striga could be tentatively treated as a member of the family Scrophulariaceae instead of Orobanchaceae. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]