What Are The Importance Of Medicinal Plants?

Throughout the ages, nature has provided humans with sources of the essentials of life, including food, medicines and raw materials for the manufacture of clothing and shelter. Man began to explore the resources of every type on earth for their potentialities to cure ailments and interpreted their effects wisely in terms of knowledge in different branches of science prevailing at that time. Exploitation of abundantly available natural resources is vital for economic development of a country like India with a large agricultural base. The vast and varied flora and fauna found thriving in the widely diverse geographical and climatic conditions of India constitute a rich source of potentially bioactive metabolites containing diverse pharmacophores
Although we have many drugs of mineral and animal origin form nature, semi synthetic and synthetic substances, plants of various species are almost the major exclusive source of natural drugs for the majority of the global population now a days. Inspite, of vigor’s and overwhelming influence of modernized medicine and tremendous advances made in the field of production of many synthetic drugs, traditional medicaments were preferred to now-a-days as natural and herbal drugs in different places in literature and they have retained their place in therapy prominently. Their uses, effectiveness, low cost, compatibility and comparative freedom from various serious toxic and adverse effects make these medicaments not only popular globally but also an advisable and accepted mode of treating diseases even in developed countries.
The subject of phytochemistry or plant chemistry has been developed in recent years as a distinct discipline, somewhere in between plant biochemistry and natural product organic chemistry and is closely related to both. It is concerned and linked with the enormous variety of organic substances that are synthesized, elaborated and accumulated by wide variety of plants and deals with the chemical structures and moieties of these new substances, their biosynthesis, storage, turnover
Notable examples are quinine from Cinchona pubescens, reserpine from Rauwolfia serpentine and taxol from Taxus species. The sequence for development and formulation of pharmaceuticals usually starts with the identification of lead molecule, bioassay and then formulation into suitable dosage form. Later, this is authenticated by several phases of clinical studies designated to establish safety, purity, efficacy and pharmacokinetic profile of the new drug. During the last few decades, there has been a tremendous interest in plants as best source of medicines and of novel molecules for use in the elucidation of physiological/biochemical phenomena. There is worldwide green revolution, which is revealed in the confidence that herbal remedies are safer and less damaging and toxic to the human body than many of the synthetic drugs. Still, initially this growth of interest in plants is based on the fact that many important and useful drugs in use today are derived from starting molecules of plant origin. Laboratories around the world are seriously engaged in the screening the plants for significant biological activity with recognisable therapeutic