(-)-Santonin

DescriptionSantonin is a lactone compound extracted from the flower bud of Artemisia cina Berg in Compositae, crown daisy chrysanthemum or other plants in Artemisia. It has been recorded in ancient China . Its English name is santonica wormseed, Chinese alias is ‘quhaosu’ and Latin name is Seriphidium cinum (Berg ex Poljak.) Pol-jak. . Santonica wormseed, a variant name for Artemisia cina Berg, is the leaf and anthotaxy of Artemisia cina Berg in sagebrush plants in Compositae. There are more than 100 plus in sagebrush, in which about 30 plus live in China, and parts of them can be used medicinally.Santonica wormseed, used as raw material to extract and manufacture santonin, lives in cold, dry sandy loam. The place of origin is the Southern Central Asia in the former Soviet Union. China introduced the earliest cultivation in Xinjiang, and now it is introduced and cultivated in the North, Northeast and Northwest China. Santonica wormseed mainly contains hispidulin, quercetin and caffeic acid, and its flower contains 1–3.5% α-santonin, 1–3% artemisinin and volatile oil (mainly is 1, 8-cineole) and so on. Leaf also contains a small amount of α-santonin. In addition, it also contains β-cintonin, 3,4,5,7-tetrahydroxy-3-methoxyflavone7- glucoside and aglucone.

HistoryThe study on the chemical properties and structure of santonin was carried out at the end of the nineteenth century all the earliest research works were from the Italian scholars, such as Cannizzaro, Andreocci, Gucci, Francesconi, etc. The chemical structures determined before 1910 were all not exactly correct. Until 1929–1930, British scholars, Clemo, Haworth and Walton, finally determined the exact structure of santonin for the transformation from synthesized santonin into desmotroposanto nin and santonous acid. However, until 1940, there were no reports on structural configuration. Chinese scholars, Huang Minglong et al., basically completed the research work on the structural configuration of santonin in 1951, and the results were proved by Japanese scholars, Abe, Y. and Harukawa et al. in 1954.