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Dimocarpus longan Lour. (also called as longan) is a subtropical and tropical evergreen tree belonging to the Sapindaceae family and is widely distributed in China, Southeast Asia and South Asia. The pulp of longan fruit is a time-honored traditional medicinal and edible raw material in China and some Asian countries. With the advancement of food therapy in modern medicine, longan fruit pulp as an edible medicinal material is expected to usher in its rapid development as a functional nutrient. As one of the main constituents of longan fruit pulp, longan fruit pulp polysaccharides (LPs) play an indispensable role in longan fruit pulp-based functional utilization. This review aims to outline the extraction and purification methods, structural characteristics and biological activities (such as immunoregulatory, anti-tumor, prebiotic, anti-oxidant, anti-inflammatory and inhibition of AChE activity) of LPs. Besides, the structure-activity relationship, application prospect and patent application of LPs were analyzed and summarized. Through the systematic summary, this review attempts to provide a theoretical basis for further research of LPs, and promote the industrial development of this class of polysaccharides.

Objectives: To better explore the valuable experience and knowledge in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) literature and promote the academic heritage and innovation of TCM, this paper tries to provide methods and a system of word segmentation and POS tagging for ancient Chinese medicine literature. Method: Based on HMM and Java language for POS tagging, this paper develops a word segmentation system of Chinese ancient books by constructing a Thesaurus of Chinese medicine terminology and a special POS tagging method for Chinese medicine, and adopting Ansj open source code as the core word segmentation algorithm. Results: Thesaurus of Chinese medicine terminology involving 155,343 Chinese medicine words are constructed. These words were divided into 14 categories and 7 levels of 891 parts of speech (POS). Online website of Chinese word segmentation and POS tagging proprietary system were established (http://www.zhongyifenci.org). And the F measure reaches 90.65%, which is much higher than the system of Ansj. Clinical or Biological Impact: This system, with high precision and recall rate, will be very helpful to knowledge discovery of Chinese medicine and be beneficial to giving full play to the original advantages of Chinese medicine.

The four known phenolic compounds, 3,4-dihydroxyphenethyl alcohol-6- O -caffeoyl-β- d -glucoside, acteoside (verbascoside), plantaginin and plantamajoside, and a new phenylpropanoid glycoside, hellicoside, were isolated from the aerial parts of Plantago asiatica , which is used in oriental medicine ‘Plantaginis Herba’. The structure of hellicoside was deduced from chemical and spectral evidence to be 3,4,7-trihydroxy-β-phenethyl- O -β- d -glucopyranosyl-(1 → 3)-4- O -caffeoyl-β- d -glucopyranoside. Plantamajoside and hellicoside showed high inhibition of cyclic AMP phosphodiesterase and 5-lipoxygenase. Acteoside showed high inhibition of lens aldose reductase.