Star Anise (Illicium verum)

Table of Contents

1. Safety First: Japanese Star Anise and Anisatin
2. Safety Second: Star Anise Does Not Treat Influenza
3. Overview
4. Names and Identification
5. Where It Grows
6. Traditional Use
7. Active Compounds
8. Digestive and Carminative Effects
9. Antimicrobial Activity in the Laboratory
10. Antioxidant and Anti-Inflammatory Research
11. Culinary Use
12. Forms and Preparations
13. Dosage
14. Cautions and Contraindications
15. Key Research Papers
16. Connections
17. Featured Videos

Safety First: Japanese Star Anise and Anisatin

This is the most important thing on the page.

Two trees, one shape

Chinese star anise (Illicium verum) is the food spice. Japanese star anise (Illicium anisatum, known in Japan as shikimi) is not food. It is toxic, it is traditionally used in Japan as a ritual and funerary plant — grown at temples and graves, burned as incense — and it has never been a culinary spice anywhere. The two trees are close relatives and their dried fruits look broadly alike, which is the entire problem.

Anisatin

Illicium anisatum contains anisatin, a sesquiterpene dilactone that is a potent non-competitive antagonist at the gamma-aminobutyric acid-A receptor. Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) is the brain's principal inhibitory neurotransmitter — the brake pedal. Anisatin works much like picrotoxin: it jams that brake. The result is uncontrolled neuronal excitation, and the clinical consequence is seizures, along with vomiting, tremor, agitation and, in infants, jitteriness, abnormal eye movements and abnormal muscle tone. It is potent enough that rodent models of anisatin-induced convulsive seizures are used as a standard experimental tool for studying seizure biochemistry.

What has actually happened to people

• The Netherlands, 2001. A herbal tea on the Dutch market caused an outbreak of illness. Sixty-three people reported malaise, nausea and vomiting two to four hours after drinking it. Twenty-two required hospital admission, sixteen of them for generalised tonic-clonic seizures. NMR analysis of the tea confirmed the presence of anisatin. The product was withdrawn. All patients recovered with supportive care.
• United States, reported 2004. Paediatricians in Miami described seven infants with adverse neurological reactions after being given star anise tea at home — a widespread folk remedy for colic in Hispanic and Asian communities. The investigators found evidence that Chinese star anise on the US market had been contaminated with Japanese star anise, called for stricter import regulation, and concluded plainly that star anise tea should no longer be given to infants.
• France and Switzerland. Paediatric case reports describe star anise poisoning in infants. One Swiss report describes an apparent life-threatening event: a 2-month-old had three episodes of blue colouring (cyanosis) and stiffening of the limbs (tetany), each passing on its own, after being given three 200 ml bottles of an infusion made with 4 to 5 star anise fruits each. The fruit tested at 7,800 µg/kg of anisatin, against a Swiss maximum of 1,000 µg/kg.

The regulatory response

The US Food and Drug Administration issued a consumer advisory in 2003 warning against consumption of star anise teas, with particular emphasis on infants, after the cluster of paediatric cases. European authorities imposed tightened import controls and testing requirements on star anise consignments following the Dutch outbreak. France went further: from November 2001 star anise products were prohibited there, although a 2003 French report noted they could still be found in some small groceries or brought in by families. The hazard the case reports describe is adulteration and infusion strength, not star anise in a stockpot.

Telling them apart by eye

It works sometimes, imperfectly, and not reliably enough to bet a baby on. In general:

• Illicium verum — usually 8 carpels (occasionally 6 to 9), plump, relatively smooth, with blunt or gently curved tips; roughly 2.5 to 3.5 cm across; a strong sweet licorice-anise smell.
• Illicium anisatum — often more numerous carpels (commonly 10 to 13), thinner and more shrivelled, with sharper, more strongly upcurved points; smaller, roughly 2 to 2.5 cm; weakly aromatic, and what smell there is tends to be green, clove-like or cardboardy rather than sweetly anise.

But this only helps with intact whole stars. Broken fragments, and above all ground star anise or pre-bagged "star anise tea," cannot be identified visually at all. Laboratory analysis is the only reliable check, and that is why the points below are about sourcing and use rather than about squinting at pods.

What the case reports point to

1. Infants and star anise tea. The 2004 Miami report concluded that star anise tea should no longer be given to infants, and the US Food and Drug Administration's 2003 advisory warned against star anise teas. The harm is documented in infants given the tea for colic, and no trial has shown a benefit.
2. Young children. The European traditional-use monograph excludes young children from medicinal star anise preparations (see Traditional Use below). Culinary star anise in a shared family dish is a different exposure entirely and is not the concern of these reports.
3. Whole stars and known sellers. Whole stars sold with a label and a known origin can at least be inspected and traced; loose, unlabelled or unknown-origin material cannot, and ground star anise cannot be checked by eye at all. A 2011 Swiss report names the sale of partly broken or ground fruit as one of the main reasons contamination goes unnoticed.
4. Cooking versus strong infusions. A star or two simmered in a large pot of broth is the traditional use pattern, with centuries of safe use behind it. The poisonings came from teas and infusions — in the Swiss case, 4 to 5 fruits in each 200 ml bottle.
5. Seizures after a herbal tea. What the person drank is the key clue for the emergency team: this diagnosis is easily missed, and easily made once the tea is mentioned. The 2011 Swiss authors state that the evaluation of an apparent life-threatening event in an infant should always include the possibility of intoxication.

Safety Second: Star Anise Does Not Treat Influenza

This is the single most persistent myth in the spice aisle, and it is worth dismantling piece by piece because the underlying facts are all true — it is only the conclusion that is wrong.

What is true

Star anise is unusually rich in shikimic acid, an organic acid that plants make as a normal intermediate in the shikimate pathway — the route by which plants build aromatic amino acids. Star anise accumulates enough of it to be worth extracting industrially, and for years the world's supply of pharmaceutical shikimic acid came largely from the Chinese star anise harvest. During the avian influenza scare of the mid-2000s and the 2009 pandemic, demand for the drug oseltamivir surged, and news coverage widely reported that most of the world's star anise crop was being diverted to drug manufacture. That was accurate reporting.

What does not follow

Shikimic acid is not an antiviral drug and has no activity against influenza. It is a starting material — a cheap, convenient supply of a particular carbon skeleton with the right stereochemistry. Turning it into oseltamivir takes on the order of ten separate chemical steps in a factory, including reactions that introduce entirely new functional groups and, historically, a hazardous azide intermediate. The part of the oseltamivir molecule that blocks the influenza neuraminidase enzyme — the reason the drug works — does not exist in shikimic acid at all. It is built during synthesis.

Two analogies that make the point stick:

• Sand is the starting material for computer chips. Eating sand does not give you a laptop.
• Crude oil is the starting material for paracetamol. Drinking crude oil does not relieve a headache.

The relationship between star anise and oseltamivir is exactly of that kind. There is no metabolic pathway in the human body that converts dietary shikimic acid into oseltamivir or into anything resembling it.

Two more facts that finish the argument

Shikimic acid is not special to star anise. It is a universal plant metabolite, present in ginkgo, sweetgum, pine needles, coffee, and most fruits and vegetables in smaller amounts. Star anise is merely a commercially convenient concentrated source.

A second source is being engineered. Because a single agricultural crop grown in a few provinces is an unstable supply for a strategic drug, researchers have built engineered Escherichia coli strains that make shikimic acid in bioreactors, and that work is well documented in the metabolic-engineering literature. The 2014 and 2015 papers cited below still describe the shikimic acid used to make oseltamivir as extracted from Chinese star anise (up to 17% of the dried pods, in the 2015 review); the bacterial strains they describe are laboratory research strains.

The bottom line

Drinking star anise tea will not prevent, shorten or treat influenza. For people with influenza who are in a group at risk of complications — pregnancy, age over 65, chronic lung, heart, kidney or immune conditions — the treatment that helps is an actual antiviral drug started early: the oseltamivir label limits treatment to people who have had flu symptoms for no more than 48 hours. Star anise in your soup is a pleasure, not a prophylactic.

Overview

Illicium verum is a small to medium evergreen tree, generally 8 to 15 metres, with smooth grey bark, glossy leathery leaves, and solitary flowers ranging from pale yellow through pink to dark red. It belongs to the family Schisandraceae — the same family as the adaptogenic berry Schisandra chinensis — though older references place it in its own family, Illiciaceae, or lump it near the magnolias. It is a botanically ancient lineage, one of the early-diverging branches of the flowering plants.

The fruit is not a single structure but a ring of individual carpels fused at the centre, radiating outward like the points of a star — usually eight of them, each holding one shiny brown seed. Confusingly for cooks, most of the aroma is in the woody carpel wall, not in the seed.

Fruits are harvested before they ripen, while still green, and then sun-dried until they turn the familiar rust-brown and go hard and brittle. A tree begins bearing at around six years old and may keep producing for a century. Because the spice is dried whole and hard, it keeps its aroma remarkably well — a jar of whole stars stays good for a year or two, far longer than most ground spices.

Names and Identification

Binomial: Illicium verum Hook.f. Family: Schisandraceae. The genus name comes from the Latin illicio, "to entice" — a reference to the smell.

Regional names:

• Chinese: 八角 bā jiǎo ("eight horns"), 八角茴香 bājiǎo huíxiāng ("eight-horned fennel"), or 大料 dà liào ("the big spice") in northern kitchens
• Vietnamese: hồi, đại hồi, or fully bát giác hồi hương — the same "eight-horned fragrance" idea
• Hindi / Urdu: chakra phool or badian — "wheel flower"
• Thai: poy kak bua; Malay / Indonesian: bunga lawang — "clove flower"
• Tagalog: sanke / anis
• Japanese: hakkaku for the edible Chinese species; the toxic native relative is shikimi

Three different plants that all taste of licorice

This is the ambiguity worth carrying away. Three unrelated plants share the flavour because they share one molecule, anethole:

• Star anise — Illicium verum, family Schisandraceae, a tree. A dried fruit shaped like a star.
• Anise or aniseed — Pimpinella anisum, family Apiaceae, a small annual herb related to carrot and parsley. A tiny grey-brown seed.
• Fennel — Foeniculum vulgare, also Apiaceae. A larger, greener, sweeter seed, plus an edible bulb.

They are not botanical relatives in any meaningful sense — the resemblance is purely chemical convergence. In cooking they are not straight substitutes: star anise is heavier, warmer and more assertive, and it stands up to hours of simmering in a way anise and fennel do not. Recipes that call for one and get another usually taste wrong rather than merely different.

And the toxic look-alike

See the safety section above. Illicium anisatum, Japanese star anise, is a genuine relative, genuinely similar-looking, and genuinely poisonous. It is the one identification error on this page that has landed people in hospital.

Where It Grows

Star anise has an unusually concentrated geography for a globally traded spice. The overwhelming majority of the world crop comes from a narrow band of subtropical southern China and adjacent northern Vietnam.

• Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China is the dominant production centre by a wide margin, with additional output from Yunnan, Guangdong and Fujian.
• Lạng Sơn province and neighbouring provinces in northern Vietnam supply most of the rest, and star anise is one of the region's signature agricultural exports.

Small plantings exist in Laos, the Philippines, Jamaica and India, but they are marginal. This concentration is exactly why the oseltamivir supply question mattered in the 2000s: a global pharmaceutical input depended on the weather in a couple of Chinese provinces.

Trade practice is worth knowing as a buyer. Whole star anise moves in bulk, is repacked many times before it reaches a shelf, and broken carpels and dust from the bottom of sacks are the material most likely to end up in cheap ground spice or bagged tea. Since that is also the material in which adulteration cannot be spotted, whole stars matter for both flavour and safety.

Traditional Use

Traditional use is history and it is culturally meaningful. It is not evidence of efficacy, and virtually none of it has been tested in controlled human trials.

• Traditional Chinese medicine uses ba jiao hui xiang as a warm, pungent, sweet herb entering the liver, kidney, spleen and stomach channels, given for cold-type abdominal pain, hernia pain, vomiting and poor appetite. It sits in the "warming the interior and dispelling cold" category alongside dried ginger and clove.
• Vietnamese thuốc nam uses đại hồi similarly for digestive complaints and cold aches, and star anise oil in warming liniments.
• Ayurveda and Unani know it as badian, used for flatulence, colic and as a breath freshener.
• European herbal practice adopted star anise after it reached Europe in the sixteenth century, chiefly as a carminative for bloating and as a mild expectorant in cough preparations. The European Medicines Agency maintains a traditional-use herbal monograph for star anise fruit covering mild spasmodic digestive complaints and cough — a "traditional use" designation, which means the indication rests on long-standing use rather than on clinical trial evidence, and which comes with age restrictions excluding young children.
• Folk paediatric use for infant colic is the traditional application behind the infant poisonings set out at the top.

Active Compounds

Star anise fruit yields roughly 5 to 10 percent essential oil, and one compound dominates it overwhelmingly.

trans-Anethole

Typically 80 to 90 percent of the essential oil. This single molecule is star anise's flavour. It is also the dominant compound in aniseed and a major one in fennel, which is why all three taste related. Anethole is roughly thirteen times sweeter than sucrose on the tongue, which explains why star anise reads as "sweet" even in a savoury broth. In laboratory and animal work it shows antispasmodic, antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory activity.

Shikimic acid

Present at several percent of the dry fruit — high enough for commercial extraction, and the reason for the oseltamivir story addressed above. It is a metabolic intermediate with no antiviral activity of its own.

Estragole (methyl chavicol)

A minor constituent, and one worth naming honestly. Estragole is the same compound found in basil and tarragon, and at high doses it is a rodent liver carcinogen; European food-safety assessments have flagged it and recommended limiting exposure to concentrated sources such as essential oils and strong herbal infusions. Culinary use of the whole spice is not considered a meaningful risk. Those assessments point at the concentrated forms — strong infusions drunk daily and essential oil taken internally — rather than the spice in food.

Veranisatins

A detail most sources omit. Illicium verum itself contains small amounts of sesquiterpene lactones called veranisatins, which a 2023 review reports caused convulsions and death in mice at an oral dose of 3 mg/kg, against 1 mg/kg for anisatin — the same broad chemical family, about a third as potent in that test, and present in far smaller quantities. This does not make culinary star anise dangerous. It does mean that even genuine, unadulterated Chinese star anise is not a completely inert plant when brewed as a strong infusion for a very small body, and it is a second reason, independent of adulteration, that the infant reports matter.

Others

• Limonene, linalool, α-pinene, foeniculin, anisaldehyde — supporting aromatics
• Flavonoids, chiefly quercetin and kaempferol glycosides — responsible for most of the antioxidant activity measured in chemical assays
• Phenylpropanoids, lignans and tannins

A widely used 2011 review in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology pulls together the botany, traditional use, chemistry and pharmacology of Illicium verum and is the standard reference for this material.

Digestive and Carminative Effects

Mechanism. Anethole relaxes gastrointestinal smooth muscle in isolated-tissue preparations, which is the standard antispasmodic mechanism shared by fennel, anise and caraway. Aromatic volatiles also stimulate salivary and gastric secretion. This is the rationale behind star anise's use for bloating, colic and cramping across every tradition that has used it.

Evidence. Isolated tissue and animal studies for star anise itself; somewhat better human evidence exists for the related plants, particularly fennel-seed preparations. There are no randomised controlled human trials of star anise for digestive symptoms. The European traditional-use monograph is explicitly based on long-standing use, not on trial data, and it says so.

What that means for you. A star anise in a pot of broth is a fine thing and may well settle a heavy meal. The claim is traditional and plausible; it is not demonstrated. Persistent digestive symptoms need investigation, not spice.

Antimicrobial Activity in the Laboratory

Mechanism. Anethole and star anise essential oil disrupt bacterial and fungal cell membranes. In culture, star anise oil inhibits a broad range of organisms, including common food-spoilage bacteria and Candida species, and this is of genuine practical interest to food scientists working on natural preservatives.

Evidence. In vitro, essentially without exception. Studies typically apply concentrated essential oil directly to organisms on a plate at concentrations that could never be achieved in a human body by eating the spice. There are no human trials showing that eating or drinking star anise treats any infection.

What that means for you. Star anise is not an antibiotic and not an antifungal. If you have an infection that needs treating, it needs actual treatment. The laboratory work is legitimate research with a legitimate application — food preservation — and it does not transfer to human therapeutics.

Antioxidant and Anti-Inflammatory Research

Mechanism. The flavonoid fraction — quercetin and kaempferol derivatives — scavenges free radicals in chemical assays, and star anise extracts reduce inflammatory signalling in cell models and in rodents, lowering markers such as tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) and interleukin-6.

Evidence. Cell culture and animal models. Rodent studies also report anticonvulsant, analgesic and sedative effects of star anise extracts, which sits oddly alongside the fact that its toxic relative causes seizures — a good illustration of how different two closely related plants can be, and of why "it's natural and related to something useful" is never an argument.

What that means for you. "Star anise is rich in antioxidants" is a true statement about a chemical assay and an unproven statement about your health. No human outcome has been demonstrated. Star anise contributes to a varied, plant-rich diet in the same modest way any aromatic spice does, and that is as far as the evidence goes.

Culinary Use

This is where star anise genuinely excels, and where its history is deepest.

• Phở. The defining spice of Vietnamese phở broth, toasted alongside cinnamon, clove, coriander seed, black cardamom and fennel, then simmered for hours with charred onion and ginger. Take star anise out and the broth stops being phở.
• Chinese five-spice powder. Star anise is the lead, with Chinese cinnamon (cassia), clove, Sichuan pepper and fennel seed. Formulations vary by region and by household.
• Red braising (hóng shāo). Chinese pork belly, beef shin and whole ducks braised in soy sauce, rock sugar, wine and star anise — a technique in which the spice's ability to survive hours of cooking is the whole point.
• Vietnamese bò kho and other slow beef stews.
• Indian cooking. Chakra phool in biryani, some garam masala blends, and Kashmiri and Mughlai dishes.
• Malay and Indonesian cooking. Bunga lawang in rendang, curries and spice pastes.
• Master stocks. The perpetually reused, endlessly replenished Chinese braising liquid, which is unimaginable without star anise.
• Western sweet use. Poached pears and quinces, mulled wine, plum and apple compotes, spiced syrups; and it flavours some anise-type liqueurs and soft drinks.

Technique. Use whole stars and remove them before serving. One to three stars is plenty for a large pot — each whole star weighs roughly a gram, and star anise overwhelms a dish fast, turning medicinal and bitter if overdone. Dry-toast briefly in a pan before adding to release the aroma. Broken pieces work fine for flavour; intact stars let you see what you are getting.

Forms and Preparations

• Whole dried stars. The one form that can be checked by eye. Identifiable, long-keeping, and the traditional culinary form.
• Ground star anise. Loses aroma quickly and, more seriously, cannot be checked for adulteration. Powder ground at home from whole stars avoids that problem.
• Five-spice powder. A blend, ubiquitous and useful; the same sourcing problem applies, since a ground blend cannot be checked by eye.
• Star anise tea and bagged herbal infusions. This is the form implicated in every documented poisoning outbreak, and the form named in the 2004 infant report and the 2003 US Food and Drug Administration advisory. Strength matters too: the Swiss infant had been given infusions made with 4 to 5 fruits per 200 ml bottle.
• Essential oil. Very concentrated, high in anethole and containing estragole. Used in flavouring and perfumery under strict limits, not as an internal remedy.
• Shikimic acid extract. An industrial pharmaceutical intermediate, not a consumer supplement. If you see it sold as a flu remedy, that is the myth addressed above being sold back to you.

Dosage

There is no established therapeutic dose for star anise, because there are no controlled human trials from which to derive one. Anyone giving you a precise medicinal dosage is repeating tradition.

What can be said:

• Culinary: one to three whole stars — roughly 1 to 3 grams — in a large pot serving several people, removed before serving. This is the exposure pattern with centuries of safe use behind it.
• European traditional-use monographs describe adult infusions made from small quantities of crushed fruit taken a few times daily for short periods, with explicit age restrictions excluding young children. Because that framework is built on tradition rather than trials, it is a boundary rather than a recommendation.
• Infants: no dose. The infant poisonings described at the top concern exactly this age group.
• Young children: star anise in family food is not the concern of the case reports; the European monograph excludes young children from medicinal infusions.
• Essential oil: no internal dose exists.

Cautions and Contraindications

Infants — the clearest hazard

The 2004 Miami report concluded that star anise tea should no longer be given to infants, and the US Food and Drug Administration warned against star anise teas in 2003. Documented cases include seizures, jitteriness, abnormal eye movements, vomiting and an apparent life-threatening event. The risk comes both from adulteration with toxic Japanese star anise and from the small amounts of neuroactive compounds in the genuine spice acting on a very small body. Colic is distressing and it is also self-limiting, and no trial has shown that star anise tea helps it.

Adulteration — everyone

Japanese star anise contamination has repeatedly reached commercial supply. Loose, unlabelled or unknown-origin material and pre-ground powder are the forms in which it cannot be spotted. A batch that smells weak, green or clove-like rather than sweetly licorice matches the description of Japanese star anise given above.

Seizure disorders

The realistic contamination hazard in star anise infusions is a seizure-causing gamma-aminobutyric acid antagonist, which makes it a greater concern for people with epilepsy or a seizure history.

Pregnancy and breastfeeding

Culinary amounts in food are considered acceptable. Medicinal infusions and essential oil have no safety data in pregnancy or breastfeeding, and they carry the adulteration risk and the estragole content described above. Star anise tea is used in some cultures to promote milk supply; there is no good evidence it does, and infants can be exposed through breast milk.

Estragole and long-term use

Star anise contains estragole, a rodent hepatocarcinogen at high doses. Occasional culinary use is not a concern. Daily strong infusions or essential-oil ingestion over long periods are a reason for caution.

Drug interactions

• Anticonvulsants — the concern is the contamination hazard: anisatin causes seizures.
• Sedatives and central nervous system (CNS) depressants — theoretical additive effects with the sedative activity reported in animal studies.
• Hormone-sensitive conditions — anethole has been described as weakly oestrogenic in laboratory systems; the relevance to culinary intake is almost certainly nil, and the finding concerns gram-level doses of concentrated products.
• Cytochrome P450 — anethole and estragole are metabolised by and can affect CYP enzymes; concentrated extracts could in principle alter clearance of other medicines.

Allergy

Rare. People with known allergy to anise or fennel may react to star anise despite the plants being botanically unrelated, because of shared compounds.

The claim to distrust

Any product marketing star anise, star anise tea or shikimic acid as a flu treatment or flu preventive is making a claim that is not supported and not chemically coherent. See the section above.

Key Research Papers

Every citation below has been checked against its PubMed record. Where an identifier could not be verified, a PubMed topic search is given instead, since a search link cannot resolve to the wrong paper.

1. Ize-Ludlow D, Ragone S, Bruck IS, Bernstein JN, Duchowny M, Peña BM. Neurotoxicities in infants seen with the consumption of star anise tea. Pediatrics. 2004;114(5):e653–e656. — PubMed PMID: 15492355
2. Johanns ES, van der Kolk LE, van Gemert HM, Sijben AE, Peters PW, de Vries I. An epidemic of epileptic seizures after consumption of herbal tea. Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde. 2002;146(17):813–816 — PubMed PMID: 12014242. (In Dutch.)
3. Minodier P, Pommier P, Moulène E, et al. Star anise poisoning in infants. Archives de Pédiatrie. 2003;10(7):619–621 — PubMed PMID: 12907070. (In French.)
4. Perret C, Tabin R, Marcoz JP, et al. Apparent life-threatening event in infants: think about star anise intoxication! Archives de Pédiatrie. 2011;18(7):750–753 — PubMed PMID: 21652187. (In French.)
5. Wang GW, Hu WT, Huang BK, Qin LP. Illicium verum: a review on its botany, traditional use, chemistry and pharmacology. Journal of Ethnopharmacology. 2011;136(1):10–20. — PubMed PMID: 21549817
6. Wei DD, Ge D, Guo PP, et al. A bird's eye view of anisatin-induced convulsive seizures in brain by a 1H NMR based metabolic approach. Molecular BioSystems. 2014;10(11):2923–2934. — PubMed PMID: 25133938
7. Li P, Wei DD, Wang JS, et al. 1H NMR metabolomics to study the effects of diazepam on anisatin-induced convulsive seizures. Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis. 2016;117:184–194. — PubMed PMID: 26361344
8. Martínez JA, Bolívar F, Escalante A. Shikimic acid production in Escherichia coli: from classical metabolic engineering strategies to omics applied to improve its production. Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology. 2015;3:145. — PubMed PMID: 26442259
9. Cui YY, Ling C, Zhang YY, Huang J, Liu JZ. Production of shikimic acid from Escherichia coli through chemically inducible chromosomal evolution and cofactor metabolic engineering. Microbial Cell Factories. 2014;13:21. — PubMed PMID: 24512078
10. Zou Q, Huang Y, Zhang W, Lu C, Yuan J. A comprehensive review of the pharmacology, chemistry, traditional uses and quality control of star anise (Illicium verum Hook. F.): an aromatic medicinal plant. Molecules. 2023;28(21):7378. — PubMed PMID: 37959797

PubMed Topic Searches

1. PubMed: Illicium verum pharmacology
2. PubMed: Illicium anisatum and anisatin toxicity
3. PubMed: Star anise adulteration and detection methods
4. PubMed: Anisatin as a GABA receptor antagonist
5. PubMed: Trans-Anethole pharmacology
6. PubMed: Shikimic acid and oseltamivir synthesis
7. PubMed: Estragole safety assessment
8. PubMed: Veranisatins and neurotoxicity
9. PubMed: Star anise essential oil antimicrobial activity
10. PubMed: Herbal teas for infant colic and adverse effects

Connections

• All Herbs
• Star Anise History
• Star Anise Benefits
• Fennel — shares anethole and the licorice flavour, and shares the phở spice pot; botanically unrelated.
• Cinnamon — star anise's partner in five-spice powder and in every good broth.
• Clove — the third of the five spices, and another warming aromatic with a real toxicity ceiling.
• Conditions on this site that reference this page: Epilepsy · Bronchitis · Influenza · Pulmonology · Chronic Cough

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