Trends in pharmacological sciences
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Trends Pharmacol. Sci. · Sep 2004
Review Historical ArticleTechniques: Bioprospecting historical herbal texts by hunting for new leads in old tomes.
Ethnobotany has led to the identification of novel pharmacological agents but many challenges to using ethnobotany as a research tool remain. In particular, the loss of traditional knowledge together with the advent of high-throughput screening has made ethnobotanical techniques laborious and potentially unnecessary. ⋯ The methodology for extracting useful information contained within these resources had been cumbersome and consuming. However, the application of new bioinformatics data-mining systems to herbal texts holds great promise for identifying novel pharmacotherapeutic leads for bioactive compounds.