XVI International Botanical Congess

In ethnobotany, the frequent recurrence of a similar use for the same plant within a culture or across cultures is often used as evidence of the likelihood that the ethnobotanical use in question will show pharmacological activity. This ethnobotanical hypothesis can be summarized as uses that appear in many cultural groups are more likely to have related biological activity than uses that appear in fewer cultural groups. To test this underlying assumption of ethnobotany, I chose to study the medicinal uses of the genus Citrus. 1,100 ethnomedicinal uses were collected from 91 countries/cultural groups and assigned to 16 use categories. The null hypothesis that there is no difference between the number of geographic areas for validated" ethnobotanical uses and the number of geographic areas for non-validated" uses was adopted. A t-test was used to test the hypothesis. The results indicate that for most disease categories there seems to be a positive relationship between an increase in the number of cultural groups/geographical areas recorded for an ethnobotanical uses and the likelihood of that use have some biological activity.