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The herbs used as the material for traditional Chinese medicine are mostly planted at mountain areas where there is appropriate weather condition. Due to the complex terrain condition in mountain area, the planting at such places is always associated with a scattered pattern, which inevitably bring difficulty to the work of accurate measurement for the planting area. Advanced research about monitoring the planting area for medicine-herb under complex environmental condition is so critical and meaningful for developing the medicine-herb planting to a large scale and an industry. Therefore, this research, taking the planting of Herpetospermum pedunculosum in Luding county as an example, utilizes RS&GIS: using the image data from TM and ETM datum as the remote sensing information source, integrating GPS data from quadrat survey on the spots, and analyzing on a GIS platform, to extract the planting area of H. pedunculosum in Luding county. The results indicate that: (1) the method and technology used to estimate the planting area of H. pedunculosum are feasible and can be applied to monitoring the planting area of medicine-herb at mountain area under complex environmental conditions: (2) the planting area of H. pedunculosum in Luding county is estimated to be 857. 246 acres by the methods utilized in this research, which is closed to the value from local statistical data with an error range less than 5%; (3) in consideration of those inevitable errorrs generating from the procedures such as remote sensing data acquisition, data preprocessing, data interpretation, and so on, and the fact that the classification of remote sensing data, which must be implemented by those above procedures, was used directly to extract the herb type, the accuracy of area estimation for the herb is significantly influenced by the accuracy of classification for herb type, and the estimated area is inevitably associated with some error.
Erigeron multiradiatus (Lindl.) Benth is a traditional Tibetan medicine herb long used to treat various diseases related to inflammation. Our previous phytochemical studies on E. multiradiatus resulted in the isolation of scutellarin, which is a known flavone glucuronide with comprehensive pharmacological actions. In present study, we investigated the inhibition action of scutellarin on high glucose-induced vascular inflammation in human endothelial cells (ECV304 cells). Consistent with previous reports, exposure of ECV304 cells to high glucose for 24 h caused an increase of intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1) and monocyte chemoattractant protein 1 (MCP-1), and promoted cell adhesion between monocyte and ECV304 cells. However, pretreatment with scutellarin (0.1 and 1 microM) reversed these effects in a concentration-dependent manner. Scutellarin was able to inhibit the activation of NF-kappaB induced by high glucose in ECV304 cells. Furthermore, although oral administration of scutellarin (10 and 50 mg/kg) did not produce significant antihyperglycemic action, it lowered the serum MCP-1 levels significantly in alloxan-induced diabetic mice. Therefore, our results suggest that scutellarin has anti-inflammation effect that may afford some protection against hyperglycemia-induced vascular inflammatory both in vitro and in vivo.