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Man has been using plants for healing purposes since time immemorial. All ancient civilizations have referred to medicinal plants, but the knowledge on medicinal plants has accumulated fast over the last few centuries. In the past few decades, plant scientists and chemists have put in a great deal of interest and efforts to identify the active ingredients of traditional or folk herbal medicines as therapeutic agents.

This book is an attempt to bring together the diverse research trends currently operative in the field of medicinal botany all over the globe. This book elucidates the varied facets of the current medicinal plant research. Beginning with the core study of distribution patterns of medicinal plants, it covers the wide range of chemical evaluation of their therapeutic properties, unravels the impact of environmental stresses on medicinal plants and their active ingredients, and highlights the modern investigations aiming at molecular authentication and quality assessment of medicinal plants, in vitro propagation of these plants for enhanced production of bioactive metabolites, and the metabolomic approach for metabolic fingerprinting and identification of new active compounds.

This book must prove to be a great source of information on recent research trends in medicinal botany and phytochemistry, catering to the need of students and researches keen on medicinal plants and stimulating a general interest for the study of medicinal plants with a proper understanding of the associated cultural, environmental and scientific scenario, as they cannot be studied, evaluated and utilized fully and properly in isolation, and need to be looked at in a global perspective.

Contents: Preface. 1. Traditional herbal therapy in the Kashmir Himalaya/Showkat Y. Beigh, Irshad A. Nawchoo, M.P. Sharma and M. Iqbal. 2. Medicinal plants of tehsil spiti of himachal pradesh and their therapeutic utility/M.K. Seth and Usha Devi. 3. Status of the medicinal and aromatic plant research in albania/Alban Ibraliu, Ndoc Faslia, Alfred Mullaj and Xuefei Mi. 4. Scientific evaluation of traditional herbal treatment for diabetes in jordan/Fatma U. Afifi and Violet Kasabri. 5. Potential botanicals for the treatment of breast cancer: pharmaceuticals approaches used to increase the absorption of herbal drugs/Rabea Parveen, Farhan J. Ahmad and Zeenat Iqbal. 6. Biodiversity, bioprospecting, IPR and benefit sharing with stakeholders in the 21st century India/P. Pushpangadan, V. George and Vipin Mohan Dan. 7. Herbal medicines interactions/Mohammad Kamil. 8. Pharmacognostical evaluation of plant drugs with special emphasis on chromatography: adhatoda vasica leaves/Madhukar Garg, Tamboli E. T. and Sayeed Ahmad. 9. Role of mineral nutrients and plant growth regulators in cultivation of some essential oil-bearing medicinal plants/Mohd. Idrees, M. Naeem and M. Masroor A. Khan. 10. Response of tansy to environmental degradation/Calic-Dragosavac Dusica and Stevovic Svetlana. 11. Therapeutic utility of malaysian rice/Zulkhairi Hi Amom, Azrina Azlan and Norhaizan Mohd Esa. 12. Microbial transformation of phenyl propanoid compounds to vanillin/Vidhu Aeri, Gulshan Sindhwani and Ilyas U.K. 13. Cyanobacteria: a rich source of novel biomolecules for drug discovery/Rakhi Bajpai, Ashwani K. Rai and G. Abraham. 14. Tissue culture technology in conservation and propagation of medicinal plants/Mohammad Anis, Ankita Varshney, Nigar Fatima, M. Imran Khan and Md. Rafique Ahmed. 15. Amplified fragment length polymorphism: a useful and versatile technique for medicinal plant research/Maryam Sarwat and Gowher Nabi. 16. Molecular biology techniques for authentication of medicinal plants/Anis Ahmad Chaudhary, Altaf Ahmad and Muhammad Iqbal. 17. Medicinal plant metabolomes: converging botany and chemistry into health opportunity/Suman P.S. Khanuja and Ashutosh K. Shukla. 18. Peptides: an emerging source of drugs/medicines/Azra Khanum, Saima Rehman and Uzma Jabeen. 19. Use of radiomutagenesis for obtaining alkaloid-rich plant mutants/N. Bensl;imani and L. Khelifi. Index.