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Review
. 2025 Jul 24:16:1631637.
doi: 10.3389/fphar.2025.1631637. eCollection 2025.

Recent advances in polysaccharides derived from the Dendrobium nobile Lindl.: preparation strategies, structural characteristics, biological activity, and structure-activity relationships

Xiao Zhou  1 , Haizheng Bi  1 , Zhaojiong Zhang  1 , Xingyu Wang  1 , Mengru Zhang  1 , Meng Wang  1
Affiliations
Review

Recent advances in polysaccharides derived from the Dendrobium nobile Lindl.: preparation strategies, structural characteristics, biological activity, and structure-activity relationships

Xiao Zhou et al. Front Pharmacol. .

Abstract

Dendrobium nobile Lindl. (D. nobile) has significant medicinal value. D. nobile is used in traditional Chinese medicine and is widely popular as a functional food and health supplement due to its nourishing properties and high safety. Among its key bioactive constituents, polysaccharides exhibit promising applications across medicine, personal care, food, and agriculture, owing to their anti-photoaging, improvement of complications of diabetes mellitus, ovarian protective, gastric protective, neuroprotective, anti-inflammatory and anti-viral effects. Despite these multifaceted benefits, research on D. nobile polysaccharides remains limited relative to more extensively studied components such as alkaloids and flavonoids. This review systematically summarizes current advances in extraction techniques, structural features, bioactivities, and structure-activity relationships of D. nobile polysaccharides, providing a theoretical framework for their future medical development and application.

Keywords: Dendrobium nobile Lindl.; biological activity; extraction; polysaccharides; purification; structural characteristics.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Plant morphology of D. nobile. (A,B) The flowers of D. nobile. (C) The roots of D. nobile. (D) The plant of D. nobile. (E) The leaves of D. nobile. (F) The rhizomes of D. nobile. (G) Dried rhizomes of D. nobile (The plant images in this article are from Plant Photo Bank of China, PPBC. https://ppbc.iplant.cn/).
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Regarding the extraction and purification of D. nobile polysaccharides (The plant images in this article are from Plant Photo Bank of China, PPBC. https://ppbc.iplant.cn/).
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
The hypothetical structure of D. nobile polysaccharides (A) DNP1. (B) DNP. (C) DNPE6 (11). (D) JCS1.
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
Potential mechanism of polysaccharides from D. nobile in anti-UVA and UVB.
FIGURE 5
FIGURE 5
Potential mechanism of polysaccharides from D. nobile in improve retinal inflammation.
FIGURE 6
FIGURE 6
Potential mechanism of polysaccharides from D. nobile in ovarian protective effect.
FIGURE 7
FIGURE 7
Analysis of D. nobile polysaccharides patents searched in https://t.incopat.com: (A) Number of patent applications per year. (B) Geographical ranking of patents. (C) Technical usage distribution.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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