The development of phytopharmaceutical medicines is based on the ethnopharmacological approach, which relies on the traditional medicine system. The concept of ‘one-disease one-target drug’ is becoming less popular, and the use of plant extracts, fractions, and molecules is the new paradigm that holds promising scope to formulate appropriate drugs. This led to discovering a new concept known as polypharmacology, where natural products from varying sources can engage with multiple human physiology targets.

February 19, 2024 - Natural products will play a vital part in supplying this need via the continuous exploration of global biodiversity, the majority of which remains unexplored. Even though drug discovery from medicinal plants remains an important source of novel therapeutic leads, various hurdles exist, including identifying and executing suitable high-throughput screening bioassays, scaling up the supply of bioactive molecules, and acquiring plant materials.

January 28, 2021 - Natural products have historically made a major contribution to pharmacotherapy, but also present challenges for drug discovery, such as technical barriers to screening, isolation, characterization and optimization.

August 15, 2015 - Table 3. Approaches to select plant material for natural product drug discovery. Table 4. Basic types of bioassays for testing of phytochemicals and their comparative advantages and disadvantages. Table 5. Strategies to identify bioactive compounds from plant extracts. Table 6. Examples of hairy root cultures from plants producing important pharmacologically active molecules developed from ROOTec bioactives Ltda.

April 23, 2026 - bioactivities/therapeutic utilities (Fig. 1) (Hao and Xiao, 2020), so as to promote bioprospecting and benefit plant-based drug R&D. Due to the fact that...

August 24, 2024 - In particular, annotations of medicinal plants, such as the IMP platform [53], not only curate high-quality genomic and transcriptomic data for many plants but also integrate practical modules for gene annotation and analysis to facilitate the exploration of natural sources for valuable chemical constituents, such as drug discovery and drug production. Annotations of biosynthetic and metabolic pathways within NP databases offer direct insights into the biotransformation processes of bioactive compounds. These annotations encompass details regarding the biosynthetic origins of NPs, including the enzymes and precursors involved in their production in living organisms.

The development of phytopharmaceutical medicines is based on the ethnopharmacological approach, which relies on the traditional medicine system. The concept of 'one-disease one-target drug' is becoming less popular, and the use of plant extracts, fractions, and molecules is the new paradigm that holds promising scope to formulate appropriate drugs. This led to discovering a new concept known as polypharmacology, where natural products from varying sources can engage with multiple human physiology targets.

January 6, 2022 - This review provides a comprehensive overview of various approaches used in the selection, authentication, extraction/isolation, biological screening, and analogue development through the application of modern drug-development principles of plant-based natural products.

April 26, 2024 - For instance, a highly cited article published in Nucleic Acids Research describes a web server, NRPSpredictor2, which uses machine learning methodology for improved substrate specificity predictions of natural product biosynthetic enzymes in bacteria. Plants and microbes produce natural products ...

Rakotondraibe’s laboratory focuses on the investigation of these new natural product sources to discover novel pharmacophores of potential drug candidates. We routinely perform bioassay-guided isolation, structural elucidation and development of bioactive compounds from natural sources (higher ...

In work on a different class of plant natural products, Don Nguyen (previously O’Maille lab) has engineered enzymes from the Asteraceae family into yeast to generate oxygenated sesquiterpenes (Nguyen et al., 2016). During his time as an OpenPlant post-doc in the Martin lab, Yang Zhang, now a Principal Investigator at Sichuan University College of Life Sciences, used the HyperTrans system in the characterization of a new pathway for synthesis of root-specific flavones in Scutellaria baicalensis (Zhao et al., 2016).

October 23, 2023 - In this Special Issue, we explore recent advances in plant-derived natural products and their biomedical properties via intriguing in vitro and in vivo research articles and literature reviews. Recently, Lantzouraki et al. showed that the extracts of two Artemisia species, Artemisia arborescens and Artemisia inculta Delile, from the Greek island of Crete exhibit an interesting profile of secondary metabolites [1]. More specifically...

Rapid progress has been made in recent years in understanding natural product synthesis, regulation and function and the evolution of metabolic diversity. It is timely to bring this information together with contemporary advances in chemistry, plant biology, ecology, agronomy and human health to provide a comprehensive guide to plant-derived natural products.

Importantly, the transition of a natural compound from a "screening hit" through a "drug lead" to a "marketed drug" is associated with increasingly challenging demands for compound amount, which often cannot be met by re-isolation from the respective plant sources. In this regard, existing alternatives for resupply are also discussed, including different biotechnology approaches and total organic synthesis. While the intrinsic complexity of natural product-based drug discovery necessitates highly integrated interdisciplinary approaches, the reviewed scientific developments, recent technological advances, and research trends clearly indicate that natural products will be among the most important sources of new drugs also in the future.

June 19, 2013 - Wolfender and Queiroz presented examples of dynamic responses resulting from stress, which induced chemical defenses in elicitation experiments in both plants and microorganisms [30]. A significantly increased number of hits, including antibacterial, antifungal and anticancer agents were described for extracts from elicited plants [30]. New groups of microorganisms obtained through small scale, high-through-put cultivation methods and employing nutrient deficient media, specific nutrients and long cultivation times constitute another approach potentially leading to new secondary metabolites of

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May 19, 2022 - Genetic engineering and modern practices expedite the synthesis of the natural product. Since ancient times, natural medicines have had paramount importance in bolstering biotherapeutics to treat various diseases. The World Health Organization (WHO) revealed that more than 80% of the population of developing countries relies on traditional medicines, predominately herbal medicine, for their immediate medications. The drugs derived from medicinal plants have tremendous diversity with superfluous potency for managing communicable and non-communicable diseases, which diminishes the burden of modern pharmacopoeias in low and middle-developed countries.

December 9, 2024 - Spongothymidine and spongouridine greatly enhanced the generation of nucleosides and eventually resulted in cytarabine (ara-C, arabinosylcytosine) production as an anti-leukemic drug and vidarabine as an antiviral agent (ara-A, arabinosyladenine) (Zöllinger et al., 2007). This review aims to explore the role of plant- and marine-derived natural products in modern drug discovery, focusing on their potential to treat life-threatening diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disorders, and infectious diseases.