Phytoinformatics in Disease Management

The profound importance of medicinal plants as therapeutic agents as well as their economic values has captured the attention of researchers around the world. However, it has been recognized that standardization of medicinal plant research is required for its incorporation into modern medicine and to maintain the healthy development of the traditional medicine industry. Due to this fact, several extensive research efforts have been added to the existing approaches to upgrade the sector through standardization and authentication of medicinal plant and plant products as well as bioengineering of metabolic pathways. This chapter has divulged information about the application of computational omics approaches to medicinal plant research and its relevance in disease management. Omics studies such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics as well as multi-omics data integration were accounted for their application in a medicinal plant. Some bioinformatics programs, tools, and web databases were explained and their application in the phytoinformatics analysis of medicinal plant was discussed. This chapter concluded with the importance of storing, integrating, and management of biological and medicinal plant data to make them available as information used in disease management. It is, therefore, hoped that this chapter will enlighten medicinal plant researchers more on the availability of computational tools to use in standardizing traditional medicine and authenticate the methodologies by making them reproducible and applicable to disease management.

Keywords: Omics studies, Medicinal plants, Bioinformatics tools, Databases, Standardization, Plant metabolites, Disease management.