ABSTRACT
This chapter compiles the research advances on phytochemical composition of medicinal plants used traditionally in Northeast Mexico for more than 30 years using standard phytochemical techniques.
Phytochemistry analysis is the scientific way to validate the popular knowledge about the therapeutic properties of the plants. The scientific study of toxic or medicinal plants used empirically as healing to diseases, seek of biological activity of the extracts, separate from an extract and identify the structure of secondary metabolites, find and test the active principles, constitute the target of our research team. More than 50% of the drugs used for the last three decades are directly or by chemical modifications obtained from the plants.
It is very important to mention that less than 15,000 of the nearly 250,000 known medicinal plants worldwide, have been studied in order to obtain their bioactive principles. This underlines the great potential of the plants in the search for new medicines. The present chapter highlights the importance of the chemotaxonomy and describes techniques of collection, identification and preparation of plant material, extraction techniques as well as the preliminary tests of the extracts trying to find their biological activity: antimicrobial, antioxidant, antifungal, antidiabetic, and the in vitro cytotoxic cell activity in tumor; and find the minimum concentration of active extract and also find the structure of the compounds, through chemical tube-tests and spectroscopy data.
