Advances in Natural Polysaccharides Research

Dear Colleagues,

Natural polysaccharides are attracting increasing interests from scientists in multidisciplinary research fields, because they are esculent and show a broad spectrum of bio-activities, including immunoregulatory activity, anti-fatigue activity, antioxidant activity, antitumor activity, anti-diabetic activity, and anti-inflammatory activity.

Polysaccharides, as the majority of the water decoction of Chinese medicines, might explain some of the bioactivities of Chinese medicines. Exploring the chemistry and bioactivities of polysaccharides will help uncover the secrets of Chinese Medicine decoctions.

Difficulties are still significant. Concerns about sample preparation, structure elucidation, and quality control of polysaccharides are often mentioned. In addition to the difficulties in chemical study, our knowledge to the mechanism of polysaccharides’ bioactivities is poor, because all these bioactivities are associated with the immunomodulatory activity to which we have not known much. All the above-mentioned difficulties further limited our knowledge to the structure-activity relationship.

Therefore, any efforts to investigate the extraction, separation, structure elucidation, quality analysis, bioactivities, mechanism of action, and the structure-activity relationship of natural polysaccharides should be encouraged. Review articles are also welcome.

Assoc. Prof. Quan-Bin Han
Guest Editor

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