Current Trends on Phytochemicals Toward Herbal Medicine Development

Traditional plants are the most promising source of phytochemicals for creating herbal medicines. Numerous biosynthetic metabolic networks are important in the biogenesis of phytochemicals and their accumulation in plants under the strong influence of environmental factors. Primary and secondary metabolites generated from plants, or phytochemicals, have great promise as chemotherapeutics for preventing or treating potential public health problems. Pharmaceutical enterprises prepare plant-derived phytochemicals into herbal medicines using various conventional methods while considering the properties of the phytochemicals. These conventional methods of producing phytochemicals as herbal medicines have several advantages and drawbacks. Additionally, the pharmaceutical industry has been forced by drug resistance and population growth to speed up the development and processing of phytochemicals from plants used as herbal medicines to address today’s human health problems. Functionalization of plant metabolic networks and its regulatory bioparts has proposed a paradigm change for phytochemicals production in model microbial platforms. Based on this existing situation, the first part of the current summary provides an overview of several plant-derived phytochemicals, their medicinal properties, the biosynthetic network in plants, and conventional methods for processing them. The development of herbal medicines as a sustainable route forward is the subject of the second half, which is centered on modern omics, systems metabolic engineering, and synthetic biology techniques to improve phytochemical synthesis using plant bioparticulates inside microbial platforms.