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the importance of plant in human life
the importance of plant in human life
the importance of plant in human life
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Introduction: Plants are the rich source of diverse bioactive compounds and using the power of these bioactive compounds for human welfare since ancient era. Bioactive compound can be defined as compounds produced by plants mainly secondary metabolites which have pharmacological or toxicological effects and play an important role in plant defense mechanism. Plant based bioactive compounds or plant extracts, provides unlimited opportunities for new drug discoveries because of the unmatched availability of chemical diversity1. In last 2 decades scientist discovered about 28% of new chemical entities and 42% of the anticancer drugs were natural plant products or their derivatives2. In recent years the researchers faces new challenges due to the emergence of antibiotic resistance developed in bacterial pathogens against standard antibiotics and current increase in the number of new diseases and pathogens. Phytochemicals provides safe and broadly effective alternatives with less adverse effect and beneficial biological activities like anticancer, antimicrobial, antioxidant, antidiarrheal...
While identifying new medicinal clues from the plant Salvia leucantha (Figure 1), Aoyagi et al. successfully isolated Salvileucalin B in 2008.1 Plants of the Salvia type have a very rich history in medicine. The name Salvia actually originates from the Latin word salvare, which means ‘to heal’. This isolated molecule exerts cytoxic activity against A594 (human lung adenocarcinoma) and HT-29 (human colon adenocarcinoma) cells with IC50 values of 5.23 and 1.88 µg/mL, respectively.1 Salvileucalin B is a unique member of the clerodane family because it contains an attractive carbon framework. The structure of this molecule is shown in Figure 2 below:
Lindberg, D. (n.d.). Herbal Medicine: MedlinePlus. U.S National Library of Medicine. Retrieved May 7, 2014, from http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/herbal
The effectiveness of any plant is not due to the action of any one chemical as modern science would have you believe. When plants are synthesized in a lab, they are analyzed to find their most potent and active components. The rest of the plant is left behind. What science is forgetting is that each leaf, stem, flower and root work in their own unique way to deliver what is need to the body.
Phenolic acids are secondary plant metabolites widely distributed in foods, especially fruits and vegetables. In recent years, phenolic acids have attracted a lot of attention because they exist ubiquitously in plants and play protective roles. Phenolic acids possess interesting biological properties, (Beilin, Stocker, & Croft, 1997) that render them interesting to study. They are widespread in crops such as fruits, vegetables, herbs, grains, and seeds and derived foods such as juices, wines, and oils, (Graf, Ameho, Dolnokowski, Milbuty, Chen, & Blumberg, 2006). Phenolic compounds play a key role in thwarting the negative impacts of oxygen and nitrogen reactive species (ROS/RNS), maintaining the redox homeostasis of biological fluids and preventing conditions such as cardiovascular diseases, atherosclerosis, and other degenerative pathologies, such as cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, (Shahrzad & Bitsch, 1998).
Society is programed to feel very healthy, but if when actual regarding the statistics it would be surprising to the contrary. The modern healthcare system is flawed in its basic theology. It focuses on treating the main symptoms and not treating the root cause and preventing illnesses. To return to a healthier society, the medical care system needs that focuses more on holistic or the all of the systems that make up someone 's body. The needs to be a shift in the way medical professionals treat their patients it would create a superior society.
Man's fascination with the many uses that can be found with the exploitation of natural substances has been demonstrated time and again throughout history, but the stage was set at the turn of the century for organic chemists to begin to focus on utilizing natural compounds for the benefit of medicinal and industrial uses. The discoveries of penicillin, aspirin, and other naturally occurring useful compounds in the earlier parts of the century set the stage for the utilization and exploitation of biologically active compounds as a molecular science. However, there are limits as to how much we can do with what nature provides us. This puts the role of the synthetic organic chemist at the forefront of synthetic compound synthesis technology. KC Nicolaou is one such leader. The main goal of Nicolaou's lab is the complete synthesis of naturally occurring compounds, along with solid phase chemistry, molecular design, combinatorial synthesis, and biological investigations; some of the results of Nicolaou's work include: the total synthesis of the anticancer agent Toxol, the marine neurotoxins brevetoxins A and B, the anititumor agents epothilones A and B, eleutherobin and sarcodictyins, the antibiotic vancomycin, the cholesterol-lowering CP-molecules, the immunosuppressant agent sanglifehrin A, the antibiotic everninomicin, and a number of bisorbicillinoids such as trichodimerol, bisorbicillinol, and bisorbibutenolide. Another example of Dr. Nicolaou's work is a paper published in Chemistry International entitled The Absolute Configuration and Asymmetric Total Synthesis of the CP Molecules (co-authored by Jae-Kyu Jung, Won Hyung Yoon, Yun He, Yong-Li Zhong, and Phil Baran.)
There is a large body of research into herbal medicines. Great progress has been made in the isolation and identification of the constituents of medicinal plants using high pressure liquid chromatography and gas chromatography. Research to identify the main active components is carried out either in a search for new drugs or to enable claims to be made for proprietary herbal preparations. Medicinal plants have been generally shown to have not one but a combination of active principles. Once these principles are found, the next step is learning how to synthesize it
Generally, antioxidants can be divided into natural and synthetic antioxidants. Natural antioxidants are normally found in the plant extracts which are believed to exhibit strong antioxidant activity and protection against oxidant-induced damage such as diabetes, neurodegenerative and cardiovascular disease (Maganha et al. 2010). Plants, fruits and vegetables are all known to be rich sources of natural antioxidants due to the presence of phenolic compounds, which are the secondary metabolites in plants (Misan 2010; Arya and Yadav 2011). Polyphenols, or phenolic compounds, constitute one of the most numerous and widely-distributed groups of substances in the plant kingdom (Urquiaga and Leighton 2000; Gan et al. 2010). They exist naturally in the form of glycosylated which makes them the most common water-soluble antioxidant compounds present in plants ...
There are five major groups of compounds that compose the human body. They are carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, nucleotides, and water. These are all very important to humans and without them we would not be able to survive. They have many functions that encourage a human cell and a human body to function.
Dietary supplements are used to add additional nutritional value to the diet. Some common forms of supplements include: vitamins, amino acids, minerals, herbs, and enzymes, and can be found in a multitude of forms such as capsules, liquids, gel caps, powders, and tablets. Dietary supplements are becoming increasingly popular among Americans today. According to the Centers for Disease and Control, “Over half of the adults in the U.S. use at least one type of dietary supplement, the most common being multivitamins.”1 Many use these vitamins because they are believed to present a number of benefits, such as helping or treating diseases, etc. While dietary supplements can be beneficial to your health; Americans should also be cognizant of the health
Medicinal or Pharmaceutical Chemistry is a scientific discipline at the intersection of chemistry and pharmacology involved with designing, synthesizing and developing pharmaceutical drugs. Medicinal chemistry involves the identification, syntheses and development of new chemical entities suitable for therapeutic use. The majority of the therapeutic agents are heterocyclic compounds; hence heterocyclic chemistry has become the most prolific area for drug discovery. Based upon the fact, the present investigation was planned and substantial interest has been shown in the synthesis and characterization of various substituted novel (1, 3) benzothiazole heterocyclies derivatives in search of potential drugs.
The use of natural products as medicine has been practiced for thousands of years. Natural products can be very diverse and yield the best medicinal results because they may produce fewer side effects. Natural products are used as the starting products by pharmaceutical companies when trying to create new, modernized medicines. Making medicine out of natural products has had a lasting effect on organic chemistry because it paved the path for modern, medicinal research on pharmaceuticals and for the development of new, synthetic medicines synthesized in a laboratory setting.
Compounds are materials made from two or more than two elements through a chemical bond. In each compound elements are arranged in a definite shape hence changing their properties from the element. Every compound possesses its own different properties such as weight, melting point, freezing point etc.
Herbal products are medicinal agents obtained from the plants. It’s all started 100 years ago by ancient people. Since synthetic medicine are not yet invented by that time, ancient people had invented medicine out of the plants. Through generations the original herbal medicine had been modified due to the new knowledge discovered and technologies invented.
Herbal remedies’ qualities are widespread availability, lower cost, effective for chronic conditions. Herbal remedies are the use of plants or plant extract to treat a person’ overall health. Herbal treatments are prominent for developing countries for instance, “in Africa up to 90% and in India 70% of the population depend on traditional medicine to help meet their health care needs” (Wachtel-Galor & Benzie, 2011), due to their low cost and availability. Herbal remedies have gained attention in the past decades, and expanding their uses due to the increased interest of natural therapies (Wachtel-Galor & Benzie, 2011). Herbs used on the remedies grow in the wild throughout the world, therefore making it easy to