ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2012
Phylogenies reveal predictive power of traditional medicine in bioprospecting.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 82 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
82 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Wild food plants of Brazil: a theoretical approach to non-random selection.Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2023Pooled it
- Taste and chemical composition as drives for utilitarian redundancy and equivalence: a case study in local medical systems in Northeastern Brazil.Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2022Pooled it
- Ethnobotany-guided exploration of plant-derived photosensitizer candidates for photodynamic therapy.Photochemical & photobiological sciences : Official journal of the European Photochemistry Association and the European Society for Photobiology · 2026Review
- Combined phylogenetic and geographic data can predict plant-pest interactions with high accuracy.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- From Ethnobotany to Pharmacognosy: A Review ofPlants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- AI-Driven Plant-Derived Anti-Infectives: Integrating Traditional Wisdom into Precision Medicine Against AMR.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Biodiversity drives the choice; linguistic diversity fine-tunes the direction: Ethnofloral megadiversity in the Mexican ethnobotany.PloS one · 2026Article
- The Role of Nucleotide Sequencing in Natural Product Drug Discovery.Journal of natural products · 2025Review
- Global phylogeny and taxonomy of Artemisia.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Can Provence Flora Offer Effective Alternatives to Widely Used Medicinal Plants? A Comparative Study of Antioxidant Activity and Chemical Composition Using Molecular Networking.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Phylogeny, ethnomedicinal use and the distribution of phytoestrogens in the Fabaceae.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2025Article
- Circumscription of the East Asia clade (Apiaceae subfamily Apioideae) and the taxonomic placements of several problematic genera.Plant diversity · 2024Article
- CMAUP database update 2024: extended functional and association information of useful plants for biomedical research.Nucleic acids research · 2024Article
- Modern drug discovery using ethnobotany: A large-scale cross-cultural analysis of traditional medicine reveals common therapeutic uses.iScience · 2023Article
- Pathways to healing: Plants with therapeutic potential for neurodegenerative diseases.IBRO neuroscience reports · 2023Article
- Plant parentage influences the type of timber use by traditional peoples of the Brazilian Caatinga.PloS one · 2023Article
- Single botanical drugs in the Ayurvedic Pharmacopoeia of India-A quantitative ethnobotanical analysis.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2023Article
- Medicinal plants used by rural Thai people to treat non-communicable diseases and related symptoms.Heliyon · 2023Article
- A phylogenetic perspective of antiviral species of the genusJournal of herbal medicine · 2022Article
- The likely extinction of hundreds of palm species threatens their contributions to people and ecosystems.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
22 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
There is controversy about whether traditional medicine can guide drug discovery, and investment in bioprospecting informed by ethnobotanical data has fluctuated. One view is that traditionally used medicinal plants are not necessarily efficacious and there are no robust methods for distinguishing those which are most likely to be bioactive when selecting species for further testing. Here, we reconstruct a genus-level molecular phylogenetic tree representing the 20,000 species found in the floras of three disparate biodiversity hotspots: Nepal, New Zealand, and the Cape of South Africa. Borrowing phylogenetic methods from community ecology, we reveal significant clustering of the 1,500 traditionally used species, and provide a direct measure of the relatedness of the three medicinal floras. We demonstrate shared phylogenetic patterns across the floras: related plants from these regions are used to treat medical conditions in the same therapeutic areas. This finding strongly indicates independent discovery of plant efficacy, an interpretation corroborated by the presence of a significantly greater proportion of known bioactive species in these plant groups than in random samples. We conclude that phylogenetic cross-cultural comparisons can focus screening efforts on a subset of traditionally used plants that are richer in bioactive compounds, and could revitalize the use of traditional knowledge in bioprospecting.
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