🌿 Folk Prescriptions

Zhou Jin, a postdoctoral researcher jointly trained by Harbin Medical University and the University of Calgary, Canada, has for the first time used gene clamp and other methods to reveal whether various pure herbal compounds possess antiarrhythmic effects and their mechanisms. Some findings overturn previous conclusions, laying a theoretical foundation for the scientific application of antiarrhythmic herbs.
In recent years, several antiarrhythmic TCMs have been developed domestically, including piperidine alkaloid, berberine, demethyleneberberine, matrine, and fangfangdian alkaloid. During his postdoctoral work at Harbin Medical University under Professor Yang Baofeng, Zhou Jin conducted pharmacodynamic and whole-cell patch-clamp studies on multiple antiarrhythmic TCMs, including the aforementioned pure compounds. From 1998 to 1999, he continued this research at the Department of Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary. Using molecular biology and gene clamp techniques, he observed the effects of berberine and matrine on cloned potassium channels expressed in African frog oocytes. The results confirmed that matrine does not inhibit multiple potassium ion channels present in cardiac cell membranes, nor do its effects correlate with blood drug concentrations—contradicting earlier research and explaining why this drug has weak antiarrhythmic effects.