ABSTRACT
In the pharmaceutical community, herbarium specimens are essential for documenting the source material used for drug discovery. A voucher typically consists of a herbarium specimen, a pressed and dried sample of an individual plant, containing aboveground structures and belowground structures when possible. The use of vouchers for taxon identity is crucial in ethnobotanical research in which botanical information collected from native inhabitants of an area is frequently limited to common plant names, often in local dialects. Voucher specimens not only are a source for correct botanical identification but also can serve as a repository for the chemical compounds of a plant at any given time during its life cycle. Vouchers collected at different intervals and in different areas can thus clearly reflect compound composition as influenced by edaphic and harvest conditions. Medicinal Plant Names Services at Kew Gardens offer information service related to medicinal plants, nutraceuticals, and poisonous plants.
