Mangiferin
In 1908, a pigment—mangiferin—was first isolated from mangoes (Mangifera indica L., Anacardisaceae) [3,6]. Mangiferin was also found in many other plants, in particular, in the families Anacardiaceae and Gentianaceae [7]. In mangoes, mangiferin is viable as a crystal in the leaves, cores and rind of the trunk [2,8] and in the pods and seeds of the fruit [8].
Mangiferin is slightly soluble in ethanol, water and insoluble in some non-polar solvents (for example, n-hexane or diethyl ether) [9]. In water, mangiferin solubility is only at 0.111 mg/mL [10].
In the traditional medicine of several countries such as China, India and Cuba, mangiferin-rich plants have been grown and actively used to treat many diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes [11], many types of infection and cancer [7,12,13,14,15].
Numerous studies confirm that mangiferin, through different mechanisms, has various biological activities such as anti-cancer [16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27], antioxidant [28,29,30,31,32], anti-inflammatory [33,34], anti-diabetic [35,36,37,38,39,40], cardiovascular protection [41,42,43,44,45,46], neuroprotective [13,40,47,48,49,50], antiviral [51,52,53,54], enhanced immunity [55,56,57,58,59,60], gastroprotective effect [61], analgesic activity [62] and radioprotection, as seen in the experiments on mice [63,64,65]. The neuroprotective effect was patented [66], also anti-allergic properties [67,68] and hepatoprotective activity [69] have been published.
