Adoption and Application of Biotechnology in Herbal Medicine Practices

According to the World Health Organization, 80% of people in underdeveloped nations and 60% of the global population, respectively, rely exclusively on herbal medications for their basic medical requirements. The public, policymakers, and healthcare experts are all becoming more concerned about the safety, standardization, effectiveness, quality, availability, and preservation of herbal products as a consequence of the rising demand for herbal medications. The most significant challenges in studying herbal medicine are incorrect plant identification and speciation, limited yields of chemically synthesized plant bioactive metabolites, diversity of traditional techniques, and others. Thus, it is crucial to choose, reproduce, enhance, and study therapeutic plants and products using biotechnological technologies. Difficulties in plant species identification can be resolved with DNA-based technique and sequencing. Under some circumstances, the production of bioactive metabolites is possible, utilizing in vitro tissue culture methods. Pharmaceuticals made from proteins may be created using recombinant DNA methods that can alter metabolic pathways. Drug development from plant-based compounds may use the emerging fields of bioinformatics and genomics. This chapter covers an introduction of herbal medicine, biotechnological methods for producing herbal medicines, biotechnological methods for conserving herbal medicinal plant products, and bioinformatics methods as well as possibilities and problems.