An Introduction to Bioactive Natural Products and General Applications

Nature has been a powerful source of potential medicinal plants with natural bioactive products for a long time period. The plants are known to contain quantum of various active principles of therapeutic value and possess biological activity against a number of diseases. These plants synthesized phytochemicals, serving as their natural defence system and also used in medicine, dye colours, fragrant, pharmaceutical, agrochemicals and flavouring. They also possess antimicrobial properties that are correlated with their ability to manufacture several secondary metabolites with antimicrobial properties like phenols, phenolic acids, flavonoids, alkanoids, tannins, quinones, coumarins, saponins, terpenoids, triterpenoids, glycosides and organic acids. Today, an increasing research interest in the herbal medicine field has been gaining popularity in both developed and developing countries. The bioactive compounds are provided by chemical diversity and natural plant products as purified compounds or as plant crude extracts. The extracts (crude) existed as a combination of different bioactive phytocompounds combined with various polarities and their partition still remains a challenge in the process of identification and characterization. Since bioactive natural products have diverse range of uses, the present book chapter constitutes a review on their distribution and geographical sources, phytochemistry, delivery technology, medicinal properties and their general potential applications in agricultural plant protection and pharmaceutical field.