Emerging Molecular Pharmacognosy

Abstract

Molecular pharmacognosy is a science dealing with crude drugs, which refer to either a kind of new products that originate in plants, animals, and minerals or natural medicinal materials that are directly used for medical care or as raw materials for medicine after a simple processing. As a subject, pharmacognosy has gone through four stages of development: pharmacognosy in ancient times, pharmacognosy in early modern times, pharmacognosy in modern times, and period of natural pharmacognosy. Molecular pharmacognosy has been given the following main tasks: systematic assortment of varieties of Chinese herbs and study of quality standardization, conservation of medicinal plant and animal biodiversity and research of sustainable utilization of crude drugs resources, medicinal plant marker breeding and new variety cultivation, gene regulation of metabolic pathway and directional control of the quality of Chinese herbal medicines, the use of genetic engineering and tissue culture technique to achieve high-level expression and production of natural active ingredients or genetically modified ingredients, genetic engineering, and green pollution-free medicinal plant.