Abstract
Humans have relied on nature throughout their ages to cater for their basic needs including medicines to cure a wide spectrum of diseases. Plants have formed the basis for sophisticated systems of traditional medicines. For therapeutic agents many of the presently known lead compounds are natural products or their derivatives. Ethnomedicinal studies play a vital role to discover new drugs from indigenous medicinal plants. Green pharmaceuticals are getting popularity and extraordinary importance because vast opportunities for new drug discoveries are provided by the unmatched availability of chemical diversity and natural products either as pure compounds or as homogenous plant extracts. Therefore, in recent years the demand for herbal medicines and several natural products from a variety of plant species is consistently increasing. In spite of being an agricultural country and having different ecological regions, the medicinal plants of Pakistan have not been explored for their secondary metabolites which are responsible for treating different diseases. Although, huge importance of different extracts of medicinal plants from Pakistan have been reported for their different activities such as antimicrobial, anti-cancerouse, antiviral and antioxidant but complete biochemical profiling of these medicinal plants is lacking. LC-MS and GC-MS techniques have been applied in the field of drug discovery from medicinal plants but in Pakistan its success rate is very low in the subject of biochemical profiling. Therefore, such techniques should be used in Pakistan to explore active constituents from medicinal plants which could be used as medicines in future.
Highlights
Botanical medicine or phytomedicine, called herbal medicine is the use of plants’ seeds, roots, berries, leaves, flowers or bark for healthcare and they have been used since the prehistoric times by the people worldwide to treat, control and manage a variety of diseases [38,39]
Concluding remarks and future perspectives Natural products are the chemical compounds found in nature that usually has a pharmacological or biological activity for use in pharmaceutical drug discovery and drug design
Secondary metabolites are distinct from the components of intermediary metabolism in that they are generally nonessential for the basic metabolic processes of the plant
Summary
Medicinal plants have been used as a source of medicine in all cultures since times immemorial [1]. In various human cultures around the world more than 35,000 plant species are being used for their medicine purposes [7] and for primary health care nearly 80% of the world populations rely on these traditional medicines which include the use of plant extracts most of the time [8]. A number of modern drugs have been discovered since the history of ethnobotany paying a distinct importance to the documentation of traditional information of medicinal plants. Earlier, when the role of medicinal plants in drugs was discovered a number of drugs were isolated such as codeine, cocaine, quinine, digitoxin and morphine Some of these drugs are still in our use [14,16]. To enlist the applications of these indigenous medicinal plants a very few attempts have been made [25] and the information is incomplete as very few common plants are listed
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