Goji Plays “Hard to Get”

Even with its extensive and diverse nutrient profile revealed, the goji still seemed to be holding on to some secrets. There appeared to be many therapeutic effects that simply could not be explained. This was not a big surprise. With medicinal herbs, activity is hardly ever due to just one single chemical constituent, as is often the case with “conventional” drugs. Rather, it is usually a mixture of constituents that are responsible for the therapeutic or protective effect of botanical medicines. Many of these herbal components are unique to a single plant species. They are not found anywhere else in nature, and have not yet been chemically identified. There are countless thousands of these herbal constituents called phytochemicals (from the Greek word for “plant”). Very few official methods are available for analyzing phytochemicals. Researchers were forced to develop qualitative and semi-quantitative chromatographic methods of separation and analysis in the painstaking attempt to unravel the complex chemical nature of botanicals. So it was with the goji berry. The goal of scientists was to try to determine all of its biologically active principles, so that they could ascertain which of the many varieties of Lycium goji berries might be the most beneficial to humans.

The researchers knew that it might take many years to isolate and quantify every chemical constituent. However, they had an ingenious idea for a shortcut that would allow them to positively identify and catalog each type of berry, separating even those that appeared to be identical. Their solution was called spectroscopic analysis, a fingerprinting technique borrowed from the science of astrophysics.