Page 66 - 2025中醫藥與天然藥物聯合學術研討會-中醫藥與天然藥物的挑戰Ｘ機遇與未來大會手冊

Achieving Precision and avoiding Ambiguity When Referring to Plants and

Fungi

,1
Bob Allkin*

1 Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, UK
* E-mail: b.allkin@kew.org

Abstract
Those editing pharmacopoeia, regulators, scientists and health practitioners need to refer

reliably and unambiguously to herbal substances. There are however several challenges to
achieving this. The common names of plants are part of every day language and are thus subject
to interpretation, their meaning changing from place to place and over time. One plant may
have multiple alternative names (synonyms). One name (“bluebell”) may be used by different
people to refer to different plant (homonyms). Pharmacopoeia and monographs include precise

descriptions of how herbal substances are to be made, used and tested. The names used, however,
are not formally registered and one name (e.g. ‘Cimicifuga rhizome’) may be used in different
pharmacopoeia to refer to substances defined in different ways and created from different plants.

Scientific names are designed to provide an unambiguous and precise way of referring to plants
or fungi and are recognized internationally. The meaning of a scientific name is precise (tied to
a physical specimen) and never changes. However, there are scientific synonyms (1.5 million
scientific names for c 400K plants) and scientific homonyms occur. Which scientific name(s)
are used for a species does change over time as chemical and DNA data accumulates enabling

the taxonomic hierarchy to better reflect evolutionary past. As search of PubMed for a medicinal
plant using a single scientific name retrieves only a modest % of the articles referring to that
plant since many different scientific names will have been used. Reference to genera (e.g.

“Acacia”) or families in pharmacopoeia or legislation is particularly problematic since the
definition of how many and which species belong to them can change drastically over time.
This talk will summarize what best practice looks like in the use of scientific nomenclature
and some of the tools and datasets which Kew has built for the use of those working in herbal
medicine.

Medicinal Plant Names Services www.kew.org/mpns is a well established resource for herbal
drugs covering almost 40,000 plant species and 0.7 million alternative names in use in the
medical literature for those plants and the drugs derived from them. A global network of partners

includes the Taiwan Herbal Pharmacopoeia.
Plants for Health (www.kew.org/plants-for-health) is a new project which will eventually
replace MPNS. It includes fungi, covers supplements and cosmetics as well as medicines and
adds additional data such as toxicity, bioactive molecules and substitute species. We seek
alpha-testers for our new data portal to be released later in 2025.

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