Preface

Human population is seen increasingly affected by several life threatening diseases. Though, several synthetic medicines are useful in treating these diseases, but still they are inefficient and unsafe. Plants based medicine and their products have proven very effecting in treating diseases, and safe to be used as an alternative medicine. Plants are considered as biochemical factories of numerous specialized metabolites that are known to promote patient’s health, and thus widely used in the management of several human ailments, including cardiovascular diseases, diabetes mellitus, cancer, neurological disorders, and various other infectious diseases due to their therapeutically valued compounds. Some of these well-known phytocompounds, such as withanolides, rosmarinic acid, podophyllotoxins, caffeic acid, taxol, etc., are used effectively in the modern medicines to combat many diseases. Based on their traditional uses and experimental evidences, plant products or compounds are isolated or extracted from the medicinal and aromatic plants. The chemical profiles of bioactive compounds and their levels in plant extracts or essential oils could be augmented through breeding. Further, chemical nature of phytocompounds and their therapeutic actions at the molecular level will simplify the discovery research to innovate novel drug leads against many diseases. The nanotechnology based drug delivery system of herbal medicines is proven to be feasible alternatives to deliver the plant-derived drugs, effectively. Lately, more number of researches have been focused on identifying bioactive plant metabolites and their underlying genes. The development omics approaches and advancements in the genome sequencing of a large number of medicinally valued plant species have significantly helped in understanding about genes responsible for secreting a particular metabolite. The genes-to-metabolites linking have been elucidated, explicitly via using the collective investigations of transcriptomics and metabolomics. The second-generation CRISPR/Cas technology has proven to be a gateway in enhancing the production of phytochemicals due to its simplicity, efficiency, and target specificity.

This book, titled Metabolites of Medicinal Plants: Insightful Approaches involves inclusive themes on medicinally important plants and their bioactive compounds. It comprises 15 chapters written by academicians, scholars, and intellectuals. Various topics like economics of medicinal plants, ethnobotany, extraction and analysis, phytochemistry, pharmacological aspects, bioavailability and nanotechnology and omics approaches are systematically reviewed in this book. This compiled concepts of book will benefit academic scholars, academicians, researchers, and scientists, medical practitioners of herbal research and biomedicine. We sincerely thank all authors of this book volume and the team of Bentham Science Publisher for their support at each and every stage of book publication.