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영어

Although glutamic acid is a non-essential amino acid, glutamate is an important neurotransmitter that plays a key role in long-term potentiation and is important for learning and memory.We analyzed the glutamate contents of methanolic extracts from 14 species medicinal herbs; Angelica gigas, Polygala tenuifolia, Cnidium officinale, Polygonum multiflorum, Phaseolus radiates, Poria cocos, Schizandra chinensis, Thuja orientalis, Eleutherococcus senticosus, Acorus gramineus, Hovenia dulcis, Codonopsis lanceolata, Zingiber officinale, Coptis japonica. We adopt HPLC system with FDAA (Marfey’s reagent) using reversed C18 column, which is available for the detection of chiral form of L, and D-glutamate. Our results show that Thuja orientalis, Schisandra chinensis, Hovenia dulcis, and Coptis japonica extracts exhibited relatively high glutamate contents of 34.92, 18.77, 22.42, and 28.23 μg/mg, respectively. Our data also exhibit that there are no detectable D-glutamate among 14 medicinal herbs. Our results indicate that these medicinal herbs could be useful functional resources of L-glutamate, which maybe lead to improve memory and learning ability.