Evaluation and Selection of Excellent Provenances of <i>Eleutherococcus senticosus</i>

Abstract

Eleutherococcus senticosus is a medicinal plant with prominent potential for pharmaceutical preparation that is naturally distributed in Northeast China. Its dried roots, stems, and fruits can be used as herbal medicine with anti-aging, anti-fatigue, anti-inflammatory, and other health benefits. With the continuous increasing of E. senticosus planting areas, some problems, such as a reduction in growth rate, fruit yield, and medicinal substances content, have become serious restricting factors for the long-term stable development of the E. senticosus industry. Therefore, the screening and selection of superior provenances, families or clones with high growth rates and high contents of medicinal substances, is urgent. In this study, 13 provenances of E. senticosus were analyzed and evaluated for growth, leaf, photosynthetic, and medicinal traits. The results showed that the majority of traits exhibited highly significant differences (p E. senticosus.

Keywords

• <i>Eleutherococcus senticosus</i>
• genetic variation
• provenance selection
• growth traits
• medicinal traits