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Polyhydroxyalkaloids in Euphorbiaceae sensu stricto

Omphalea diandra.

Polyhydroxyalkaloids (PHAs) are water soluble nitrogen-containing compounds bearing hydroxyl groups on a piperidine, pyrrolidine, indolizidine, pyrrolizidine or nortropane ring system. Their structure in whole or in part can resemble simple sugars, and as a consequence many PHAs inhibit sugar processing enzymes or receptors. In plants they occur in unrelated families, either sporadically in only a few genera as in Araceae and Leguminosae or extensively in many genera as in Hyacinthaceae and Myrtaceae. Their occurrence in Euphorbiaceae was discovered at Kew following a collaboration with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute to study the chemistry of Omphalea diandra, the larval food plant the colourful dayflying moth Urania fulgens that undergoes periodic and spectacular mass migrations in Central America. The identification of food plants of related uraniine moths then resulted in the discovery of PHAs in two other genera of Euphorbiaceae, Endospermum and Suregada, currently placed in two different tribes with the latter being in a different subfamily. Recent DNA sequence data suggests that these three uraniine food plant genera may be more closely related than thought from morphology, although the data are not conclusive. Thus this project aims to determine the distribution of PHAs in Euphorbiaceae and assess whether this chemical character is phylogenetically informative.

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