The problem of misidentification between edible and poisonous wild plants: Reports from the Mediterranean area.

Today, in many European countries, people are looking for wild edible plants to experience new tastes and flavors, by following the new trend of being green and environmentally friendly. Young borage and spinach leaves can be easily confused by inexpert pickers with those of other plants, including poisonous ones, such as Mandragora autumnalis Bertol. (mandrake) or Digitalis purpurea L. (foxglove), common in southern and northern Italy respectively. In the last twenty years, several cases of intoxication by accidental ingestion of mandrake and foxglove have been reported. The purpose of this work was to perform a pharmacognostic characterization of young leaves from borage, mandrake, foxglove and spinach, by micro-morphological, molecular and phytochemical techniques. The results showed that each of the three techniques investigated could be sufficient alone to provide useful information for the identification of poisonous species helping the medical staff to manage quickly the poisoned patients. However, the multi-disciplinary approach proposed could be very useful to asses the presence of poisonous plants in complex matrices, to build a database containing morphological, molecular and phytochemical data for the identification of poisonous species or in forensic toxicology, given their increasingly frequent use due to their low cost and relatively common availability.

Smart drugs: green shuttle or real drug?

We have combined morphological, molecular, and chemical techniques in order to identify the plant and chemical composition of some last-generation smart drugs, present on the market under the following names: Jungle Mistic Incense, B-52, Blendz, and Kratom 10x. Micromorphological analyses of botanical fragments allowed identification of epidermal cells, stomata, trichomes, starch, crystals, and pollen. DNA barcoding was carried out by the plastidial gene rbcL and the spacer trnH-psbA as universal markers. The combination of morphological and molecular data revealed a mixture of plants from different families, including aromatic species, viz., Lamiaceae and Turneraceae. GC-MS and LC-MS analyses on ethanol or methanol extracts showed the presence of synthetic cannabinoids, including JWH-250 in Jungle, JWH-122 in B-52, and JWH-073 and JWH-018 in Blendz. In Kratom 10x, only the indole alkaloid mitragynine was detected. All the identified synthetic cannabinoids, apart from mitragynine, are under the restriction of law in Italy (TU 309/90). Synthetic cannabinoid crystals were also identified by scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, which also detected other foreign organic chemicals, probably preservatives or antimycotics. In Kratom only leaf fragments from Mitragyna speciosa, containing the alkaloid mitragynine, were found. In the remaining products, aromatic plant species have mainly the role of hiding synthetic cannabinoids, thus acting as a "green shuttle" rather than as real drugs. Such a multidisciplinary approach is proposed as a method for the identification of herbal blends of uncertain composition, which are widely marketed in "headshops" and on the Internet, and represent a serious hazard to public health.