Chapter 22 - Bioprospecting and bioassay-guided isolation of medicinal plants—A tool for drug discovery

Abstract

Medicinal plants have been serving as vital sources for drug discovery. A significant proportion of clinically approved drugs are originated from plant-derived natural products which were isolated by chromatographic techniques and identified by spectroscopic analysis. Bioactivity-guided fractionation is considered an efficient approach for retrieving active chemical constituents and pure compounds from medicinal plants. In search of more potential drug candidates, various drug discovery programs have been launched. These include the University of Illinois at Chicago based International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (UIC-ICBG) program and Lingnan region drug discovery program, in which numerous bioactive molecules have been isolated and identified. They will be discussed in this chapter as examples to highlight the use of the bioassay-guided separation tool to efficiently obtain the bioactive compounds from thousands of plant extracts. A range of simple, rapid and commonly used bioassays in research laboratories as well as medicinal plant-derived natural products will also be delineated.