9819721652

This book discusses the importance of plants in terms of their natural bioactive products and medicinal, nutraceutical and health benefits. Plants are natural sources of many pharmaceutical compounds used in traditional and modern medicine, and their mass production and efficient use is imperative in view of the new emerging diseases. This book covers breakthroughs in the research of plant natural products by focusing on how different state-of-the-art biotechnologies facilitate their discovery, the molecular basis of their biosynthesis, as well as synthetic biology. Research on plant's natural products in the pre-genomic era was focused on discovering bioactive molecules with pharmaceutical activities, and identifying individual genes responsible for biosynthesis. In the post-genomics era, however, integration of inter-disciplinary approaches and detailed analysis of all accessible data from multi-informatics is necessary. This would accelerate the full characterization of biosynthetic and regulatory circuit for producing plant natural products.