Medicinal Plants Case Study

Medicinal plants are an important source of drug since ancient times. These plants are characterised by the presence of bioactive principles like alkaloids, terpenoids, glycosides and phenolic compounds (Sharma et al., 2013; Harborne, 1973; Bhakuni, 1984; Okwu, 2004; Selvamohan et al., 2012; Dhawale, 2013) for which it had always been in great demand at the global level. As per World Health Organization (WHO), nearly eighty percent of the World’s population relies on traditional medicine for their healthcare requirements (Schuster, 2001), as these medicines are not lethal, non-narcotic, comparatively free from side effects and exhibit varied pharmacological roles. Besides this, therapeutic plants have been used for therapy and prevention of

in medicinal plants were reviewed by Lovkova et al., (2001). Henceforth, because of such an eminent significance several medicinally important plants are grown in domestic gardens, few are cultivated as crops, through single cropping or intercropping technique and hardly in the form of plantation crops (Padua et al., 1999). Countries like India exhibit approximately several herbal industries and a plenty of unregistered herbal industries that rely on constant supply of therapeutic plants for synthesis of herbal plants origin formulations prepared on the basis of Indian Systems of Medicine. Apart from industries, significant amount of therapeutic herb resources are also utilized in conventional health care practices at the domestic level by healers and practitioners (Maiti,

Most diseases of medicinally important plants are of fungal origin (Paul & Singh, 2002) chiefly belonging to genera like Alternaria, Curvularia, Colletotrichum, Erysiphe, Cercospora, Fusarium, Pythium, Rhizoctonia, Puccinia, Sclerotium etc. (Sinha, 2002). Majority of these phytopathogens are responsible for causing leaf blight disease in plants. For instance Alternaria tenuissima is involved in causing leaf blight in Catharanthus roseus (Sarwar & Khan, 1973), and Datura metel (Ganguly & Pandotra, 1962), Curvularia andropogonis in Cymbopogon citrates (Alam et al., 1982), Sclerotium rolfsii in Azadirachta indica (Sankaran et al., 1986), Corynespora cassicola in Ocimum sp. (Sinha, 2002), Colletotrichum capsicii in Chlorophytum borivilianum (Sattar et al., 2005), Rhizoctonia solani in Coleus froskohii (Prajapati et al., 2003), Alternaria brassiceae (Umalkar & Nehemlash, 1977), Alternaria solani (Frame et al., 1998) and Alternaria longipes (Maiti et al., 2007a) is the causal agent for blight disease in Medicago sativa. Likewise foliar blights had also been reported to be caused by Alternaria dianthicola in Withania somnifera (Maiti et al., 2007b) and A. bernisii in Cuminum cyminum (Sinha & Dutta, 2002). Alternaria alternata has been reported as the causal fungal pathogen