About this Research Topic

Background

Botanical drugs with medicinal properties have been widely used by indigenous populations for a long time as a primary health care practice. There is a continuing interest in many industrial sectors in the production of herbal extracts to cater to the popular and rising demand for herbal product formulations and for further market development. Such herbal extracts are commonly incorporated into herbal medical products, plant-based medicines, foods, health supplementation, cosmetic and personal care products to name a few. By incorporating an herbal extract, one can increase its perceived value and enhance the functional claim of the products. However, there is a great variation when it comes to the phytochemical composition of the herbal extracts, whereby even similar plant varieties or species are used in processing. This is due to the fact that the bioactivities of the herbal formulated products are strongly influenced by the phytochemical composition, especially the plant bioactive constituents. Furthermore, the phytochemical composition of the herbal extract is highly dependent on different processing methods variables including extraction and fractionation.

Notably, not all herbal extracts are suitable for all types of herbal products to ultimately produce the desired effect of the product in question. The extraction and fractionation techniques, as well as their processing variables must be well designed to obtain the desirable phytochemical composition, and consequently the whole upstream and downstream processes need to be unscaled while ensuring consistency in terms of the quality of each product. Specifically, a wide range of conventional and modern extraction and fractionation techniques ranging from thermal and non-thermal approaches have been applied to produce herbal extracts with heat labile or nonlabile compounds. The herbal extracts would be incorporated into regulated product formulation and developmental applications such health supplementation, cosmetics, and toiletry, as well as the food industry. The selection process of extraction and fractionation techniques that one should preferably use needs to be justified and must include the analysis of the physiochemical properties of the phytochemicals of interest. The processing variables such as the solvent system, temperature, duration and agitation or rotation speed are known to make an impact on the phytochemical profile of herbal extracts. Therefore, the interplay between different variables must be well studied in order to obtain the highest recovery of the target bioactive phytochemicals of interest.

This Research Topic will welcome submission Original Research, Review and Mini-Review articles dealing with the processing techniques of extraction and fractionation, as well as their associated variables, in order to recover bioactive compounds from medicinal plant materials in line with the specific product development application.

The following themes, including but not limited to can be discussed:

• Medicinal plants processing techniques.

• Investigation and optimization of processing variables when it comes to herbal preparations.

• Upscaling, ascertaining reproducible composition and in the herbal processing procedures.

• Effects of processing techniques on the bioactive constituents found in plants.

• Medicinal plants product formulation and drug development.

• Bioassays containing herbal products for the purpose of quality assurance.

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All the manuscripts submitted to the collection will need to fully comply with the Four Pillars of Best Practice in Ethnopharmacology (you can freely download the full version here).

Keywords: Herbs, bioactive compounds, phytochemicals, extraction, ethnopharmacology

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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