Role of Traditional Knowledge Associated with Plants and Its Bioprospecting: Realities and Challenges

From time immemorial, plants have been used by mankind to fulfill their primary health care needs. Historically, such knowledge associated with plants is being transferred through generations orally and documented in various platforms to facilitate further investigation. Many therapeutically active phytochemical constituents with traditional origin are still in use. The curative ability of plants and the use of traditional medicinal knowledge are exposed to the public during the pandemic time. Post-COVID scientific world gained interest in exploring traditional knowledge to cure such life-threatening diseases and to boost immunity in the long run. Screening, extraction, identification, isolation, and purification of bioactive phytoconstituents and structure elucidation are performed to validate traditional knowledge associated with plant species which eventually results in commercial product(s). Pharmaceutically active commercial products derived through such testing are called bioprospecting. India, a tropical country, is bestowed with diverse plant species and therefore, there is great scope for identifying more pharmaceutical leads. Ethnobotanical bioprospecting has contributed largely to healthcare around the globe. The number of plant species examined for their pharmaceutical activity in detail is minimal when compared with the total plants. Hence, a series of bioprospecting studies could be performed on codified and non-codified traditional knowledge which potentially yield novel drug candidates. Over-exploitation and subsequent species loss could hamper natural product-based drug discovery. Though, modern drug discovery approaches such as, synthetic biology, combinatorial chemistry, and rational drug design are emerging, still plant species occurring in and harvested from natural habitats are safe, affordable, and valuable. Conservation efforts and responsible access to potential plant species and/or associated knowledge have to go hand in hand to sustainably use medicinal plant diversity and support traditional practitioners and growers monetarily.