Phylogenies reveal predictive power of traditional medicine in bioprospecting.

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

SUBMITTER: Saslis-Lagoudakis CH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3465383 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature