Natural Products: Exploring Potential Against SARS CoV2

As all pandemics reorient the world not only in the health sector, COVID-19 also had caused major havoc even in the socioeconomic sector. Identifying the causative organism as SARS CoV2 and studying the entire mechanism of its infection and pathogenicity were possible due to rapid advancement in analytical techniques in the recent past. Discovery and development of therapeutic agents and vaccinations were not time-consuming as before. But the rapid mutation rates of the virus and antiviral resistance were the major hindrance to drugs developed. This situation has forced scientists to explore an alternative for preventing the outbreak and the spread of COVID. Since plants are considered as a storehouse of abundant phytochemicals with innumerable therapeutic potentials, unravelling their efficacy and screening them for their antiviral potential are found to be a good alternative. This has opened up a new arena in proposing these repurposed drugs against SARS CoV2 infection. This chapter is an attempt to discuss the potential of natural bioactive agents and their isolation and their screening using traditional and modern techniques for their antiviral efficacy. An integrated approach utilising our traditional natural wealth of phytochemicals and employing new era methods of in silico analysis and AI-based screening will be able to exploit the full therapeutic potentials of bioactive compounds.