article · Frontiers in Pharmacology
Eight cultivated and wild Solanum species grow in Uzbekistan, including nightshades, tomatoes, aubergines, and potatoes. These plants have historically served as food and traditional remedies for human illnesses, yet systematic ethnobotanical and ethnomedicinal documentation within Uzbekistan remains limited. A review of scientific literature in Uzbek, Russian, and English details their botanical characteristics, distributions, global food uses, and pharmacological profiles. Globally, species such as black nightshade, sticky nightshade, and potato feature prominently in traditional medicine and scientific studies. However, significant knowledge gaps persist regarding the safety, pharmacology, and toxicology of their active extracts and isolated compounds. To validate their therapeutic uses and improve biological efficacy, future research must prioritise comprehensive phytochemical analyses, biotechnological investigations, and structure-activity relationship evaluations of compounds derived from these plants.
Traditional botanical knowledge forms a foundation for drug discovery and sustainable healthcare, but valuable uses can be lost without scientific documentation. Clarifying the pharmacological, toxicological, and nutritional profiles of local Solanum species helps validate empirical folk remedies, establish safe consumption boundaries, and identify candidates for future therapeutic development.
This work highlights early-stage research opportunities for pharmaceutical and nutraceutical developers seeking bioactive compounds from Solanum taxa. While species like black nightshade and potato are widely cultivated or recognised in folk medicine, commercial application remains at an early exploratory stage. Realising viable products requires rigorous pharmacological testing, safety and toxicology validation, biotechnological processing, and structure-activity optimisation of active extracts before industrial or clinical uptake is feasible.
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Despite its millennial existence and empirical documentation, the ethnological knowledge of herbs is a more recent phenomenon. The knowledge of their historical uses as food, medicine, source of income and small-scale businesses, and the sociological impacts are threatened due to the slow ethnobotanical research drive. Species of the genus <i>Solanum</i> have long been extensively used in folk medicine to treat various illnesses of humans since the dawn of civilization. All data were systematically obtained from papers, monographs, and books written in Uzbek, Russian, and English through various scientific online databases, including Google, Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus, Semantic Scholar, Science Direct, and Web of Science using specific keywords focused on eight <i>Solanum</i> species. Eight native and non-native <i>Solanum</i> species as <i>S. dulcamara</i> L., <i>S. lycopersicum</i> L., <i>S. melongena</i> L., <i>S. nigrum</i> L., <i>S. rostratum</i> Dunal., <i>S. sisymbriifolium</i> Lam., <i>S. tuberosum</i> L., and <i>S. villosum</i> Mill. have been recorded in Uzbekistan of Central Asia. In this article we presented recently obtained data on the diversity, morphological characteristics, global distribution, habitat, population status, phenology, reproduction, pharmacology and phytochemistry of these <i>Solanum</i> species in Uzbekistan. Furthermore, relying on a combination of literature reviews and analyses from various scientific papers, we focus on food consumption coupled with global ethnobotanical and ethnopharmacological uses in human diseases of the <i>Solanum</i> species growing in Uzbekistan. Since the dawn of civilization, these eight cultivated and non-cultivated species of <i>Solanum</i> have provided sustainable resources of medicinal plants in Uzbekistan to prevent and treat various human diseases. Based on the collected data, it was shown that <i>Solanum</i> species have not been studied ethnobotanically and ethnomedicinally in Uzbekistan and it is necessary to conduct phytochemical and biotechnological research on them in the future. Traditional uses and scientific evaluation of <i>Solanum</i> indicate that <i>S. nigrum</i>, <i>S. sisymbriifolium</i> and <i>S. tuberosum</i> are one of the most widely used species in some parts of the world. Although considerable progress has been made to comprehend the chemical and biological properties of <i>S. nigrum</i> and <i>S. tuberosum</i> species, more research on the pharmacology and toxicology of these species is needed to ensure the safety, efficacy, and quality of their biologically active extracts and isolated bioactive compounds. Additionally, conducting additional research on the structure-activity relationship of certain isolated phytochemicals has the potential to enhance their biological efficacy and advance the scientific utilization of traditional applications of <i>Solanum</i> taxa.
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DOI: 10.3389/fphar.2023.1287793
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