Orchidaceae plants have high medicinal, ornamental and scientific research value. The reporter learned from the Kunming Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences on the 11th that recently, the researchers of the Institute obtained a high content oligosaccharide with anti-aging effect from Dendrobium candidum for the first time, which means that new progress has been made in the research of orchid medicinal plant polysaccharides. Relevant achievements were published online in the journal Carbohydrate Polymers. Orchidaceae is one of the oldest and largest families in angiosperms. It is a highly evolved and complex family, with a total family of about 800 genera and more than 20000 species, and widely distributed. China is one of the countries with the richest orchids in the world. Southwest China, represented by Yunnan, is one of the distribution centers of orchids in the world. According to the ecological habits, orchids are mainly divided into three categories: terrestrial, epiphytic or saprophytic. The corresponding medicinal orchids include white clover, dendrobium and gastrodia. Because of the special physiological habitat, orchid medicinal plants are rich in polysaccharides in tubers, stems or pseudobulbs. Polysaccharides are not only the main way of energy storage of orchid medicinal plants, but also one of the main substances of medicinal parts. Due to the diversity and complexity of natural polysaccharide structure and the limitations of research methods, it has brought great challenges to chemical work for a long time, and also hindered people from further understanding the pharmaceutical activities of polysaccharides from orchid medicinal plants. In recent years, Hu Jiangmiao Special Group of Kunming Institute of Botany has mainly engaged in pharmaceutical research on structural characterization of natural polysaccharides and metabolic diseases, and carried out research on orchid polysaccharides. Recently, they used effective degradation methods to obtain a high content of α- Mannose oligosaccharides. Multidimensional studies on genes, cells, skin in vitro and human clinic have shown that this oligosaccharide can be used as exogenous supplement and trigger biological processes such as extracellular matrix expression through relevant signal pathways, thus playing an anti-aging role. It is reported that this is the first time to study oligosaccharides to alleviate skin aging through highly specific methods, and provides a new solution to the anti-aging problem that people are generally concerned about. (Outlook New Times)