Pharmacological potential of naturally occurring nonstarch polysaccharides (NSP)

Abstract

Since ancient times, plants have been serving as a promising source of medicines and in recent times, extensive research has been made to isolate, characterize and screen a number of phytoconstituents/secondary plant metabolites for their pharmacological activities and safety in various disease models – both in vitro and in vivo. One such category of phytoconstituents is “polysaccharides”. These are found in different parts of the plant such as roots, leaves, stem and leaves and are extracted maximally in polar solvent – for eg. water extract of the afore mentioned plant parts contain the crude polysaccharide fraction. These are non-starch type in nature and can be a mixture of more than one type of polysaccharide too. In this review, an attempt has been made to discuss such therapeutically active plant polysaccharides in terms of their wide pharmacologically active profile along with methods to isolate and characterize them in brief.