The future of drug discovery–are collections needed

摘要: Collections serve as repositories documenting the distribution of plants across time and space. At the same time, collections, both living and preserved, are an immense source of ‘big data’for a wide range ofresearch applications from the core discipline of taxonomy to testing evolutionary relationships in the ‘genomics era’, drivers of biodiversity, and the highly topical impact ofenvironmental change. In this paper, we argue that collections are also essential for medicinal plant research and have the po tential to significantly impact modern drug lead discovery. Collections are, at the very least, needed to allow authoritative identification and documentation of medicinal or any other plant material. Additionally, collections provide a powerful framework for understanding variation of natural products at all scales from ecological or chemical types within species, to chemical diversity within lineages and across the entire plant domain. Examples from recent studies are that DNA barcoding can be used for au thentication ofEquisetumarvense products, and collections can provide easily accessible high quality samples for creating barcoding reference libraries. Medicinal uses ofAloe has been correlated with the phylogeny and succulence of the leaves, and the origin of now globally popularAloevera could be traced to the Arabian Peninsula, suggesting a connection with ancient trade routes. Using collections provide easy access to bio diversity for improving selection and focusing drug lead discovery efforts, avoid de structive collection of rare and threatened species, and provide added value to collec tions. However, new collections are needed in medicinal …