Molecular approaches to screen bioactive compounds from medicinal plants

Abstract

Screening of bioactive compounds from medicinal plants has become a vital player in the discovery of new drugs and various pharmacological targets. The chemical screening using the techniques like liquid chromatography, liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry and liquid chromatography-nuclear magnetic resonance provides an enormous number of structural information about the known and unknown compounds from the crude plant extracts. These compounds are a great resource in the discovery of new lead compounds, as most of the times, these compounds are known to carry a lot of medicinal significance. On the other side, isolation of bioactive compound is relatively a simple process, but screening of the isolated bioactive compound for required metabolites production is a cumbersome process. In the recent past, a large number of techniques have been developed for identification and characterization of these bioactive compounds. In the current chapter, at the outset, we have presented an overview of different medicinal plants, types of secondary metabolites and their medicinal significance too. Following it, we have elaborated and compared various traditional and advanced molecular approaches to screen various bioactive compounds from different plant sources.