ABSTRACT
Throughout history, medicinal plants have played an essential role in human healthcare by producing a vast array of phytochemicals. These phytochemicals are mainly composed of complex compounds called secondary metabolites. The complex secondary metabolites produced by plants have found various therapeutic uses in both traditional and modern medicine. Such interest is because of the high expenditure, less efficacious with serious side effects of most synthetic drugs used for disease remedies, and most importantly, drug resistance developing in pathogen microorganisms against modern drugs. This brought the exploration for the safest and lowest toxicity medication essentially from medicinal plants.
Many secondary metabolites manufactured by several species of Asteraceae (Compositae) are important in biomedicine, pesticides, and other applications due to the content of alkaloids, flavonoids, quinines, lignans, steroids, and terpenoids. Tagetes patula L. is one of the most important species of Asteraceae, as it is used worldwide in folk and modern medicine, the cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries. In this chapter, the phytochemical composition of the different extracts of T. patula L. are covered. Furthermore, the current state of literature in traditional medicine, pharmacological efficacies, and their biocidal activities are reviewed.
