Bioactive Compounds from Plant Sources
Summary
Plants produce a vast array of bioactive compounds—secondary metabolites such as alkaloids, flavonoids, terpenoids and phenolic glycosides—that mediate interactions with their environment and offer diverse therapeutic potential. These molecules display antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, antitumour and neuroprotective activities. Advances in chromatographic and spectroscopic methods have improved isolation and structural elucidation, while omics strategies and high-throughput screening accelerate the discovery of novel scaffolds. Nonetheless, challenges remain in optimising extraction yields, ensuring compound stability and standardising complex mixtures for clinical development. The global significance of plant bioactives spans agriculture, food preservation, pharmaceutical innovation and the mitigation of antibiotic resistance, underscoring an interdisciplinary effort to translate ecological diversity into practical applications.
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Bioactive Compounds from Plant Sources publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in bioactive compounds from plant sources across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Bioactive compound: A naturally occurring molecule that exerts a specific effect on biological systems.
Secondary metabolite: An organic compound not essential for basic metabolism but conferring ecological or pharmacological functions.
Glycoside: A molecule in which a sugar moiety is covalently bound to a non-sugar aglycone, altering solubility and bioactivity.
Hyphenated technique: An analytical method combining separation (e.g. chromatography) and detection (e.g. mass spectrometry) in a single workflow.
Prostaglandin E₂: A lipid mediator derived from arachidonic acid that plays a central role in inflammation, pain and fever.
References
- Three undescribed dihydrostilbene glycosides from leaves of Camellia oleifera Abel. And their anti-inflammatory activity. Heliyon (2024).
- Exploring the Significance, Extraction, and Characterization of Plant-Derived Secondary Metabolites in Complex Mixtures. Metabolites (2024).
- Chemical profiles of essential oil from Javanese turmeric (Curcuma xanthorrhiza Roxb.), evaluation of its antibacterial and antibiofilm activities against selected clinical isolates. South African Journal of Botany (2022).
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