Synthetic drugs have been developed to treat a large spectrum of diseases, however, their use has been associated with several issues including high levels of toxicity, manufacturing costs, and the emergence of cellular resistance. This has led to increased interest in manufacturing drugs from plants because of the vast potential of their bioactive compounds. Research to date has explored a wide variety of plants identifying a number of bioactive metabolites that have been used for pharmaceuticals. In addition, metabolites from plants have further health benefits that can be explored and utilised, for example antioxidant supplements.
To date, common laboratory-based extraction techniques have been predominantly used to extract bioactive metabolites from medicinal plants. However, these techniques present various downsides including the requirement of large amounts of organic solvents. These not only affect human health but cause severe environmental problems. Furthermore, these medicinal plants are subject to long hours of high pressure and temperature during extraction damaging the metabolites that are being extracted. To overcome these impediments, several efficient laboratory-based eco-extraction techniques are used as good alternatives to these traditional ones. The use of green solvents to extract the bioactive metabolites with higher yields within a shorter time make these extraction techniques more environmentally friendly and should be explored further.
The aim of this Research Topic is to highlight the sustainability of new eco-extraction technologies of medicinal plants under research and development. Therefore, we warmly invite researchers to contribute and submit original research articles, reviews, and perspectives looking at laboratory-based green extraction techniques of medicinal plants. Topics covering, but not limited to, the following will be considered for review:
- Laboratory-based green extraction techniques of medicinal plants;
- Identification and assessment of the bioactive preparations and pure metabolites using different techniques (e.g. NMR, MS, HPLC, GC, LC-MS/MS, HPLC-PDA-Ms/Ms) after laboratory-based green extraction to assess quality, yield, components etc.
- Pharmacological and toxicological studies of bioactive metabolites using green extraction including in-vitro and in-vivo bioactivity and metabolism studies, acute toxicity studies, histopathological studies, pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamics studies.
Frontiers in Ethnopharmacology welcomes manuscripts within the scope of the section. Manuscripts addressing green extraction techniques to produce pure and identified bioactive metabolites from medicinal plants and evaluation of their therapeutic potential are welcome. Research on enriched and chemically well-characterized extracts from medicinal plants are most welcome. Studies on extracts used in traditional medicine are also welcome only if they were carried out by green extraction processes. All the manuscripts submitted to the collection will need to fully comply with the
Four Pillars of Best Practice in Ethnopharmacology (you can freely download the full version
here.
