Modern Molecular Biology Technologies and Higher Usability of Ancient Knowledge of Medicinal Plants for Treatment of Human Diseases

Abstract

Medicinal plants and plant products have been used by humans since the ancient times. Medicinal plants find wide usage in developed as well as in developing countries worldwide even till date, and yet there is not much crosstalk between the researchers of molecular medicine and/or diagnostics and practitioners and users of alternative medicines. In this chapter, we have tried to connect the dots and identify certain simple yet well-established molecular technologies that we believe should be employed in order to identify the function of the genes and the effect of the bioactive compound(s) in medicinal plant(s) to treat patients with various chronic diseases such as various cancers or enhance conventional treatment for better patient outcome.