The development of galenic pharmacy

Plants can be said to be nature's chemists. Compared with animals, they have formed a unique way of survival and evolution in the past hundreds of millions of years. Most of our biomedical research now focuses on animals, especially model animals.

Since their early origins, terrestrial plants have to take root in the soil. All subsequent evolution can only be based on the fact that they cannot move, so they gradually evolved to synthesize various compounds to protect themselves, regulate their growth, and attract microorganisms and animals beneficial to the plant host. Compared with mobile animals, the static metabolic evolution of plants is often inconspicuous in people's eyes. These unique and very effective chemical synthesis capabilities make plants the most successful survivors of the earth's terrestrial biosphere.

Plant metabolic evolution is also a substantial untapped scientific treasure, which contains the secrets of many plants and animal interactions and coevolution. In the past many years, people have a prejudice that plant science seems to be less critical to human health than animal science. However, we have only recently come to realize that an in-depth understanding of the chemical diversity of plants, the mechanism of plant biochemical synthesis ability, and the evolutionary basis can directly promote the development process of small molecule drugs and contribute to human health.

Early research on plant secondary metabolism mainly focused on discovering what kinds of small molecules are in plants. It was later developed to study the biochemical synthesis pathways of various small molecules in plants. With more and more plant small molecule biochemical synthesis pathways gradually being recognized, we can understand plant metabolic pathways' evolution.