ABSTRACT
Plant metabolites and bioactive materials have been an attractive pharmacological tool for human welfare since ancient times. Plant materials are preferred over synthetic and other natural materials due to their high compatibility and low toxicity profiles when used for human systems. Since plant derived metabolites and bioactive compounds are easily available in huge variations with low production cost, that do not trigger significant immune cell responses, their replacement in usage to synthetic compounds are equally reliable and preferable as therapeutic drugs. The metabolites are effective against several pharmacological targets, like controlling the blood glucose concentration, modification or degradation of pathogenic microbial metabolism, inhibition of inflammatory enzymes, cancer and pain. Indigenous knowledge provides lots of information about different plants having different medical benefits. Now with the advanced and sophisticated biotechnological tools, many plant metabolites and bioactive compounds are identified with possible pharmaceutical uses. Since there are enormous varieties of plant species present, we can say that lots of undiscovered bioactive plant metabolites remain to be identified. Despite of having a lot of scopes, there are certain challenges that have to be overcome to extract the benefits of a huge source of possible drugs. These challenges include, identification of the potential source plant or plant parts, mode of procurement of the metabolites, designing the process in vitro, separation, and purification of the metabolites and scale-up of the production process. Hence with research progressions, the problems are studied intensively to overcome the challenges to obtain the therapeutic plant metabolites and then large scale production of the same has to be designed for industrial purpose.
