The authors thank the Consejo de Ciencia y Tecnología del Perú (CONCYTEC) (Council for science and technology of Peru) (299 - 2014 - FONDECYT) for the Ph.D. scholarship (PGVO). Authors are indebted to the communities cited in this work for their essential contribution in order to spread their ancestral knowledge in favor of science. We also appreciate the important collaboration of Lizardo Fachin Malaverri, Stéphanie Denis, Dennis del Castillo Torres and Juan Vásquez Briones

Ethnopharmacological relevance: In the Peruvian Amazon as in the tropical countries of South America, the use of medicinal Piper species (cordoncillos) is common practice, particularly against symptoms of infection by protozoal parasites. However, there is few documented information about the practical aspects of their use and few scientific validation. The starting point of this work was a set of interviews of people living in six rural communities from the Peruvian Amazon (Alto Amazonas Province) about their uses of plants from Piper genus: one community of Amerindian native people (Shawi community) and five communities of mestizos. Infections caused by parasitic protozoa take a huge toll on public health in the Amazonian communities, who partly fight it using traditional remedies. Validation of these traditional practices contributes to public health care efficiency and may help to id...

This work has been developed with the funding from Cienciactiva, an initiative of the National Council for Science, Technology and Technological Innovation (CONCYTEC) contract 239-2015-FONDECYT. In addition, this work was also supported by the French ANR grant ANR-15-CE29-0001. We express our thanks to Dr. J. Bignon (ICSN) for performing the cytotoxic assays. We also thank K. Leblanc (BioCIS) for her assistance in the preparative HPLC purifications. We are grateful to Dr. M. Wang, Prof. P. Dorrestein, and Prof. N. Bandeira (University of California, San Diego) for developing and making public the GNPS platform.