Adeosun, W.B.; Loots, D.T. Medicinal Plants against Viral Infections: A Review of Metabolomics Evidence for the Antiviral Properties and Potentials in Plant Sources. Viruses2024, 16, 218.
Adeosun, W.B.; Loots, D.T. Medicinal Plants against Viral Infections: A Review of Metabolomics Evidence for the Antiviral Properties and Potentials in Plant Sources. Viruses 2024, 16, 218.
Adeosun, W.B.; Loots, D.T. Medicinal Plants against Viral Infections: A Review of Metabolomics Evidence for the Antiviral Properties and Potentials in Plant Sources. Viruses2024, 16, 218.
Adeosun, W.B.; Loots, D.T. Medicinal Plants against Viral Infections: A Review of Metabolomics Evidence for the Antiviral Properties and Potentials in Plant Sources. Viruses 2024, 16, 218.
Abstract
Plants have developed unique mechanisms to cope with the harsh environmental conditions to compensate for their lack of mobility. A key part of their coping mechanisms is the synthesis of secondary metabolites. In addition to their role in plants’ defense against pathogens, they also possess therapeutic properties against diseases, and their use by humans predates written history. Viruses are a unique class of submicroscopic agents, incapable of independent existence outside a living host. Pathogenic viruses continue to pose a significant threat on global health, leading to unprecedented fatalities on a yearly basis. The use of medicinal plants as a natural source for an-tiviral agents has been widely reported in literature in the past decades. Metabolomics is a powerful research tool for the identification of plant metabolites with antiviral potentials and can be used to isolate compounds with antiviral activities in plants and study the biosynthetic pathways involved in viral disease progression. This review discusses the use of medicinal plants as antiviral agents, with a special focus on the metabolomics evidence supporting their efficacy. Additionally, suggestions are made for the optimization of various metabolomics methods for characterizing the bio-active compounds in plants and subsequent understanding of the mechanism of their operation.
Biology and Life Sciences, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
