Editorial: Plant-derived natural compounds in drug discovery: The prism perspective between plant phylogeny, chemical composition, and medicinal efficacy, volume II

Abstract

Editorial on the Research TopicPlant-derived natural compounds in drug discovery: the prism perspective between plant phylogeny, chemical composition, and medicinal efficacy, volume II "Pharmacophylogeny" and consequent "Pharmacophylogenomics" aim to disentangle the intricate relationships and connectivity between medicinal plant phylogeny, phytochemical constituents and bioactivities/therapeutic utilities (Figure 1) (Hao and Xiao, 2020), so as to promote bioprospecting and benefit plant-based drug R&D. Due to the fact that most medicinal plant researchers are not yet familiar with the theory and methods of pharmacophylogeny, there is still little research on the simultaneous examination of phylogeny/phylogenomics, phytochemistry, and bioactivity. Based on the 13 papers published in the first volume of this Research Topic (Hao et al., 2022a), the volume II has contributed eight brilliant research papers on the metabolomics, network pharmacology and bioactivity of various medicinal plants, covering gymnosperm (Xu et al.), basal angiosperms (Hu et al.), monocot (Hu et al.), basal eudicot (Kakkar et al.), core eudicot (Zheng et al.), Lamiids (Chen et al., Shang et al.) and Campanulids (Zeng et al.), etc.These research findings provide rich compound and pharmacological activity data for further exploration on pharmacophylogeny, facilitating the analysis of distribution patterns of various medicinal compounds and pharmacological activities on the phylogenetic tree (Hao et al., 2022b;, the inference of biosynthetic pathways and therapeutic mechanisms of compounds, and the search for novel drug sources.Pharmacophylogeny suggests that curative plants of the related taxonomic groups are more likely to possess the analogous chemical profiles/efficacies, which is supported by the Frontiers in Plant Science frontiersin.org 01