Industrial Crops and Products 12 (2000) 149
Introduction
Symposium on Simmondsin.
Held at the Association for the Advancement of Industrial
Crops Meeting,
20 October, 1999 in Eugene, Oregon, USA
www.elsevier.com/locate/indcrop
Simmondsin is a natural product present in the seeds of the jojoba plant, Simmondsia chinensis (Link, Schneider) which is native to the Sonoran desert. It was first identified by Elliger and Waiss in 1973 and in many publications was considered to be toxic because weanling mice died in a few weeks when it was incorporated into their feed at high levels. It has since been proposed that the mice died of protein starvation because the sim-mondsin induced very low food intake. In addi-tion, single oral doses had very low toxicity. More recently, simmondsin and simmondsin ferulate were shown to have hunger satiation effects in rats with no adverse side effects at 0.25% concen-tration in the diet which typically reduced food intake by 20%. In this series of papers on sim-mondsin, there has been a concerted effort to bring together researchers who are investigating simmondsin and its unusual effects. What has been achieved is a series of papers that represents the state of our knowledge in 1999 which should serve as a central reference for further advances in the area. Among the papers is a cooperative effort to develop consistent analytical methods and stan-dards for measuring simmondsin, a proposed new method for measuring simmondsin content, evi-dence of the effect of simmondsin on food
reduc-tion intake in dogs, findings of adverse effects of chronic, higher than recommended, doses of sim-mondsin in one rat study and new derivatives of simmondsin for both health and industrial appli-cations. In addition, a 3-year study of jojoba germplasm for selection of both high oil and simmondsin yielding plants has resulted in the selection of clones for propagation in expanded field plantings.
What is not known about simmondsin is its metabolic pathway for its elimination, the long term effects of 0.25% simmondsin with reduced food intake beyond 12 weeks and whether the adverse effects in one race of mice occur in other animals in other diet formulations. In other words, more research needs to be done, and the potential applications in weight control in pets and humans are still worth pursuing.
May 12, 2000 Thomas P. Abbott USDA, National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research,
1815North Uni6ersity Street, Peoria, IL 61604, USA E-mail: abbotttp@mail.ncaur.usda.gov
