Medicinal Plants Domestication, Cultivation, Improvement, and Alternative Technologies for the Production of High Value Therapeutics: An Overview

Abstract

Medicinal plants are source of several valuable drugs known as natural products or secondary metabolites. Only a handful of medicinal plants are cultivated while most of them are still collected from wild. Due to the high demand for these products, over-exploitation resulted in endangering the species, loss of biodiversity, adulteration of plant materials and products, and the effect on ecosystem. Plants and plant products are used in many traditional medicines for several centuries. To meet the demand of raw plant material for direct use or industrial use, agrotechnologies have been developed for several medicinal plants, alternative biotechnologies (micropropagation, production in cell cultures grown in shake flasks and bioreactor, transfer of gene/s in plant and microbes, modification of biosynthetic pathways, etc.) and microbial production system have been attempted. Understanding seed and floral biology, development of agrotechnologies and introduction into new habitat may improve the availability of raw medicinal plant material associated with the improved downstream process can affect high recovery. Similarly, the use of sophisticated detection methods, high throughput screening methods, genomics and proteomics can through light on genes involved, types of biomolecules, and new sources of known drugs. Biotechnological methods (elicitation, immobilization, cloning of selected strains, hairy root cultures, and gene manipulation) including gene editing can help in improvement in the production system. With ever-increasing population and reliability of herbal medicine, demand for medicinal plants continues to increase; hence, domestication of plants along with new technologies is a demand of time to meet the challenge of supply of uniform raw material. This brief overview presents state of research on medicinal plants and their products.