Botanical compound could prove crucial to healing influenza

Virginia Tech researchers have discovered that abscisic acid has anti-inflammatory effects in the lungs as well as in the gut.

Building on previous work with the botanical abscisic acida, researchers in the Nutritional Immunology and Molecular Medicine Laboratory (NIMML) have discovered that abscisic acid has anti-inflammatory effects in the lungs as well as in the gut. The results will be published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry.

"While the immune effects of abscisic acid are well understood in the gut, less was known about its effects in the respiratory tract. We've shown definitively that not only does abscisic acid ameliorate disease activity and lung inflammatory pathology, it also aids recovery and survival in influenza-infected mice," said Raquel Hontecillas, Ph.D., study leader, assistant professor of immunology at Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, and co-director of NIMML.

Read the full story here: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-07/vt-bcc071812.php