Title : Recent advances in phytochemical techniques
Abstract:
Mankind has been dependent on plants from time immemorial for his primary needs, and as civilization advanced, the application of plants and plant products extended to drugs, cosmetics, perfumes, dyes, pesticides, fuels, food supplements, nutraceuticals etc. The property of a plant depends on its chemical constituents, and the plant kingdom represents an extraordinary reservoir of molecules, synthesized from the fascinating laboratory of plants, and phytochemistry deals with these compounds. Scientific efforts so far have resulted in sorting around 2 lakhs natural products with 6,000 skeletons. The systematic approach to phytochemical research involves extraction of the plant material, separation and purification of the constituents and structure elucidation.
In the extraction process, the common organic solvents are slowly being replaced by more efficient solvents like super critical CO2, and further solventless extraction techniques utilizing pressure, heat, filtration, and agitation to isolate desired compounds from plant material for specific applications are getting more popular. Solid phase microextraction (SPME) is an efficient solvent-free sample preparation technique where advancements in fibre coatings and hyphenations have created significant improvements in the extraction efficiencies. Advances in ambient analytical techniques such as head space (HS) analyses for volatile chemicals and direct analysis in real time mass spectrometry (DART) for non-volatile chemicals have eliminated the laborious sample preparation steps.
The advancements in hyphenated analytical techniques such as LC-MS and GC-MS have saved the time and effort significantly. Recently, the computational tools such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning were incorporated to predict the spectra of complex phytochemicals and helps in processing the large quantity of spectroscopic data with respect to structural features, and has wide applications in plant metabolomics, chemical fingerprinting, chemical taxonomy, biosynthesis and phylogenetic studies, prediction of pharmacological and toxicological properties and virtual screening or in silico studies.
Overall, from the time consuming conventional wet-lab experiments, the phytochemists took the historical jump to instrumental analyses, and currently computer technology, especially Artificial Intelligence as well as Machine Learning, is bringing a paradigm shift in phytochemistry field as well. Imbibing the recent developments in various sectors of Science and Technology, phytochemists are now working in boarder areas with other subjects such as ecology, biotechnology, taxonomy, leading to groundbreaking discoveries, contributing significantly in unravel the secrets of nature.
Audience Take Away Notes:
•Phytochemical diversity
•Phytochemical techniques
•Hyphenated analytical techniques
•Recent advances in phytochemical analytical techniques
