Overview

Throughout history, natural products from plants have played major, sustaining roles in the lives of humans, especially for food sources and for medicinal products. Natural products have, until recently, been the primary source of commercial medicines and drug leads. A recent survey revealed that 61% of the 877 drugs introduced worldwide can be traced to or were inspired by natural products (Dias et al., 2012). However, beginning in the 1990s, natural product drug discovery was virtually eliminated in most big pharmaceutical companies. This was primarily due to the promise of the then-emerging field of combinatorial chemistry, whereby huge libraries of man-made small molecules could be rapidly synthesized and evaluated as drug candidates (Koehn and Carter., 2005). Thus far, this approach has led to lukewarm results at best. From 1981 to 2002, no combinatorial compounds became approved drugs, although several are currently in late-stage clinical trials. At the same time, the number of new drugs entering the market has dropped by half, a figure of which the large pharmaceutical corporations are painfully aware. The haystack is larger, but the needle within it is more elusive. This has led only recently to a newfound respect for the privileged structures inherent within natural products (Macarron et al., 2011). Of the roughly 350,000 species of plants believed to exist, one-third of those have yet to be discovered. Of the quarter million that have been reported, only a fraction of them have been chemically investigated. Food plants and culinary herbs and spices are known to contain myriad Phytochemicals with medicinal properties (Cseke et al., 2016).

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