The Status of Plant and Plant–Microbe Interactions Related to Medicinal Agents

Abstract

For millennia, medicinal plants have been the source of medicines initially for everyone, but since approximately the middle of the twentieth century, in the West, their use has been decreasing significantly as drugs that though frequently came directly from plants and/or microbes were substituted for direct usage of plant extracts or mixtures. Currently one can estimate that over 70% of the world’s population still have access only to medicinal plants. Ancient systems that compiled data on how to collect and use such ‘mixtures’ are still used extensively, with examples being traditional Chinese Materia Medica (or TCM), the Ayurvedic system in India, Arabic herbals, and Korean and Japanese equivalents, with similar systems used in the Americas among indigenous peoples. In the West, beginning with the isolation and purification of morphine in the early 1800s in France, and continuing with the subsequent isolation and identification of significant other compounds, probably culminating in the synthesis of acetyl salicylic acid (aspirin) in Germany in the late 1800s, the drugs in use, though in a significant number of cases based upon initially plant-associated compounds, are now made in chemical laboratories, even though the original ‘lead’ came from nature, initially from plants.