Vanillin biological activities

Vanillin occurs in the roots of many species and in the soil surrounding the growing plants, but at low pH it remains tightly bound in both roots and soils (15, 17). The analogous acid, vanillic, appears to be much more biologically active ( 18, 2 ), and no further studies of vanillin are planned at this time. 

Hydroxy Coumarine a Versatile Reagent for the Synthesis of Heterocyclic and Vanillin Ether Coumarins with Biological Activities... 

In chapter nine Hamdi et al. describes the synthesis and biological activities of the heterocyclic and vanillin ether coumarins. 

Xenobiotic food additives, drugs, and biologically active endogenous compounds can interact and affect body biochemistry. For example, dopamine sulfotransferase activity is strongly inhibited by the colorant tartrazine and flavorant vanillin, and vanillin, erythrosine B, and octyl gallate inhibit the sulfation of 17 alpha-ethinylestradiol, a xenobiotic steroid J75l... 

To test the predictive power of this relationship, six biologically active molecules were used as a validation set. Vanillin was included in this set to investigate the predictive capability for molecules with internal hydrogen bonds. The predicted log Pqw for this data set are listed in Table 3 together with experimentally determined values. Several of the predicted values are very close to the experimental, e.g. caffeine and vanillin The largest deviation is found for clonidine, for which our relationship overestimate the log Pqw value by only 0.51 units. These results clearly indicate that eq. 20 has a predictive capability also for more complex molecules. 

N. Hamdi, M. Saoud and A. Romerosa, 4-Hydroxy Coumarine A Versatile Reagent for the Synthesis of Heterocyclic and Vanillin Ether Coumarins with Biological Activities , in Topics in Heterocyclic Chemistry, eds. M. Khan and... 

The remaining shlklmates in Table III also are relatively simple, well known compounds. The phenolic structures of vanillin (125) and gallic acid (127) and the prephenolic structures of the common quinic acid (128) and chlorogenic acid (129) make them candidates for physiological activity. Gallic acid is the monomer for tannins, biological polymers found in the cotton plant (15, 37). 

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