Introduction: The increase in multidrug resistance and lack of efficacy in malaria therapy has propelled the urgent discovery of new antiplasmodial drugs, reviving the screening of secondary metabolites from traditional medicine. In plant metabolomics, NMR-based strategies are considered a golden method providing both a holistic view of the chemical profiles and a correlation between the metabolome and bioactivity, becoming a corner stone of drug development from natural products.
Objective: Create a multivariate model to identify antiplasmodial metabolites from 1H NMR data of two African medicinal plants, Keetia leucantha and K. venosa.
Methods: The extracts of twigs and leaves of Keetia species were measured by 1H NMR and the spectra were submitted to orthogonal partial least squares (OPLS) for antiplasmodial correlation.
Results: Unsupervised 1H NMR analysis showed that the effect of tissues was higher than species and that triterpenoids signals were more associated to Keetia twigs than leaves. OPLS-DA based on Keetia species correlated triterpene signals to K. leucantha, exhibiting a higher concentration of triterpenoids and phenylpropanoid-conjugated triterpenes than K. venosa. In vitro antiplasmodial correlation by OPLS, validated for all Keetia samples, revealed that phenylpropanoid-conjugated triterpenes were highly correlated to the bioactivity, while the acyclic squalene was found as the major metabolite in low bioactivity samples.
Conclusion: NMR-based metabolomics combined with supervised multivariate data analysis is a powerful strategy for the identification of bioactive metabolites in plant extracts. Moreover, combination of statistical total correlation spectroscopy with 2D NMR allowed a detailed analysis of different triterpenes, overcoming the challenge posed by their structure similarity and coalescence in the aliphatic region.
Keywords: In vitro antiplasmodial activity; Keetia leucantha; Keetia venosa; NMR-based metabolomics; STOCSY; Triterpenes.