Pharmacological characterization of Bioactive compounds of medicinal plants

The Indian sub-continent is known as botanical garden of the world having rich culture and global use of medicinal herbs with wide botanical diversity. Plants are the richest bio-resource of drugs of traditional systems of medicine, modern medicines, nutraceuticals, food supplements, folk medicines, pharmaceutical intermediates and chemical entities for synthetic drugs. From the ancient time, plants have been playing a major key role for the improvement of humanity, presenting as an astonishing source of natural medicine. Plant-derived substances have recently become of great concern owing to their multifaceted applications. All Plant parts including stem, roots leaves, flowers consist of various secondary metabolites or the bioactive compounds like alkaloids, flavonoids, saponins etc. which are otherwise known as the inherent silent tools of self- protection among plants or semio-chemicals in plants.Their pharmacological characterization depends upon isolation and extraction of compounds using methods like Filtration, Centrifugation, Soxhlet and analysis is done using techniques like Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectroscopy (GC-MS), Thin Layer Chromatography (TLC), High Liquid Chromatography (HPTLC), Fourier Transform Infrared Spectral(FTIR) etc. These plant-derived components exhibit potent pharmacological actions and are found to be effective in the treatment of various ailments like Cancer, Tuberculosis, Diabetes etc. and further research can help in finding new sources of plants and bioactive compounds associated within them, so that more complex diseases can be cured by this eco-friendly and cost-effective approach.

Author(s): Navneet Joshi

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