Plants and Their Toxic Constituent's Forensic Approach: A Review -

Plants contain a large number of biologically active chemicals. Some of these have been found to be extremely useful for treating various human and animal diseases (e.g. digitoxin, colchicines and atropine). However, some plant chemical constituents produce adverse health effects following exposure. Fortunately, among thousands of plants in the environment of animals, relatively few cause acute, life-threatening illnesses when ingested. The diversity of chemical substances in plants is quite amazing. There are a number of broad categories of toxicologically significant plant chemical constituents. These include alkaloids, proteins, glycosides and resins. The present review is an effort to collect all the facts regarding poisonous plants, toxic constituents and their chemical tests for forensic analysis. In the present review an efforts have been made to highlight various poisonous chemical constituents of the plants. Scattered literature regarding classification of plant’s chemical constituents, methods of analysis of poisonous chemical constituents have been thoroughly received and collected from journals, analytical procedure manuals and text books to make this review useful to all specialists of different discipline especially it has been design to provide an essential information of analytical approach. In this review an efforts have been made to include common poisonous plants, their harmful chemical constituents used as a weapon of crime.