Introduction of bioprospecting opportunities for Indonesian mangrove species

Abstract

Indonesia is one of the world’s most biodiverse countries. This study would be focused only on the Indonesian mangrove forests biodiversity. There are about three million hectares of mangrove forests that grow along the 95,000 km of Indonesian coastline. Mangrove forests have ecology, social, economic and medicinal values that have been used by people who live along coastal area for centuries. Many studies have shown that mangrove extracts contain many bioactive compounds that have the medicinal potential for a variety of diseases. However, mangrove plant extracts are yet to be commercially formulated as modern medicines. Although Indonesia is home to one of the largest biodiversity of plants, the interest of pharmaceutical industries in the development of herbal medicines as drugs are not as promising as those from chemical synthetics. One of the reasons for this phenomenon is a low interest in synthesizing bulks of natural products. In addition, there is a lack of facilities which can provide optimization of the herbal materials. The aim of this article is to give a rational approach for designing a bioprospecting program as an initiation on the primary screening of novel drugs from Indonesian mangrove species.