Phytochemical & Pharmacognostical Studies on Indian Medicinal Plants

Natural product chemistry is concerned with the enormous variety of organic substances that are elaborated and accumulated by plants. Natural products are noted for their highly complex molecular architectures and they show amazing arrangement of functional groups, strained ring systems and other attractive structural attributes. The reason for interest in natural product chemistry is manifold. First, natural products may serve as lead compounds for new drugs. Second, they give us information on possible bio mechanisms and thus on the molecular origin and basis of diseases. Third, their isolation has provoked novel analytical techniques and spectroscopic instrumentation. Fourth, natural products are a permanent challenge with respect to total synthesis and stimulate the development of new reagents and reactions. Plant medicine is a broad category of medicament, which includes drugs used in traditional system of medicine, folklore and ethnomedicinal products, as well as drugs discovered from plants having no documented therapeutic use. There has been a resurgence of interest in the development of new drugs from plant sources.