Molecular Pharmacognosy—A New Borderline Discipline Between Molecular Biology and Pharmacognosy

Abstract

Molecular pharmacognosy is based on molecular identification technologies and has provided an identification basis of crude drugs at the gene level. Molecular pharmacognosy includes the systematic assortment of varieties of traditional herbal medicine and Chinese herbs, and studies quality, standardization, conservation, and diversity of medicinal plants. The molecular pharmacognosy in twenty-first century embraces many items from the study of molecular taxonomy, phylogenetic evolution of medicinal plants and animals, conservation of endangered species, molecular identification of medicinal raw materials, controlling metabolic pathways and biosynthetic regulation of secondary metabolites in plants, conservation of biodiversity, genetic engineering, tissue culture technology, production of pollution-free medicinal plants, structure-activity relationships with a drug potential, etc. to genetic engineering technology based on molecular cloning and the related tissue culture technology, especially molecular marker technology based on PCR. Molecular pharmacognosy is a rising discipline combining molecular biology and pharmacognosy, and its development depends on systems biology with reference to genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, and also involved methods of modern biotechnology. Molecular biology has become vital to drug discovery from medicinal plants, through the determination and accomplishment of appropriate screening assays directed toward physiologically relevant molecular targets. DNA markers based tools for molecular identification of traditional medicinal materials are considered more reliable for authentication of herbal materials.