Manolito G. Ybañez Jr.
IV-BSCT
Natural Products
Prof. Vic Marie I. Camacho
“And the actual achievements of biology are explanations in terms of mechanisms founded on
physics and chemistry, which is not the same thing as explanations in terms of physics and
chemistry.”--Michael Polanyi
As my head accepts new learning upon reading such literatures like this, I always come
into a realization of how great the Chemistry is. With the wonders and extraordinary things that
we can discover, we humans are just a tiny dot on the play.
The article entitled “Determination of Taxonomic Status of Chinese Species of the Genus
Clematis by Using High Performance Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectroscopy (HPLC-MS)
Technique” has been a very technical literature to me. It talks about how the species of Chinese
plants’ taxonomy was elucidated. By the use of so known method, HPLC-MS, the species were
successfully explored.
High performance liquid chromatography mass spectrometry is an extremely versatile
instrumental technique whose roots lie in the application of more traditional liquid
chromatography to theories and instrumentation that were originally developed for gas
chromatography (GC). As the name suggest the instrumentation comprises a high performance
liquid chromatography (HPLC) attached, via a suitable interface, to a mass spectrometer (MS).
Due to limited level application of fundamental infrageneric classification of the species,
the researchers made this study to explore more on the mystery and puzzle of Clematis.
Appreciably, they tested different chemical markers to verify whether they may cast light on
patterns of systematic relationships within Chinese species of genus Clematis. Also, the role of
chemodiversity and chemosystematic study in quality control of herbal medicines is discussed
as many Traditional Chinese Medicines (TCMs) are obtained from species of the genus.
The results congruently favors chemical based classification, however some minor
discrepancies within group III of CCT is inviting for further taxonomic exploration. This may be
due to analytical error or small number of samples analyzed. It is also plausible that these
species may be genetically more related to each other. Hence, further detailed and
comprehensive taxonomic studies based on chemical analysis are inevitable to solve this
plethora and others, for definite identification and classification of many species of genus
Clematis. Moreover, further detailed morphological and chemotaxonomic analysis throughout
the whole range of distribution of Clematis taxa may be helpful to study the comprehensive
phylogenetic and taxonomic position of this large and complex genus.