Secondary Metabolites Extracted from Annonaceae and Chemotaxonomy Study of Terpenoids

The Annonaceae family of plants is one of the most anatomically and structurally uniform families. Chemotaxonomy is a common practice to determine the chemical patterns within these families at different phylogenetic levels. The aim of this study was to build a dataset of all the secondary metabolites isolated within the Annonaceae family and to perform the respective chemotaxonomic analysis using self-organizing maps (SOMs). This dataset is composed of 5321botanical occurrences and 1860 unique molecules present in all subfamilies of the Annonaceae. Diterpenes account for 366 unique compounds and 533 botanical occurrences seen in both Annonoideae and Malmeoideae subfamilies. The Annoneae, Xylopieae and Miliuseae tribes had the highest number of botanical occurrences and were therefore selected for the analysis. Molecular descriptors of the diterpenes and their respective botanical occurrences were used to generate the SOMs. These SOMs demonstrated clear and indicative tribe separations, with a match rate higher than 70%. Our results corroborate with the morphological and molecular data. These models can be used to predict the phylogenetic location of certain diterpenes and to accelerate the research of Annonaceae secondary metabolites and their biological potentials.