Canter Peter H, Thomas Howard, Ernst Edzard
Complementary Medicine Group, Peninsula Medical School, Universities of Exeter & Plymouth, 25 Victoria Park Rd, Exeter EX2 4NT, UK.
Trends Biotechnol. 2005 Apr;23(4):180-5. doi: 10.1016/j.tibtech.2005.02.002.
Consumption of herbal medicines is widespread and increasing. Harvesting from the wild, the main source of raw material, is causing loss of genetic diversity and habitat destruction. Domestic cultivation is a viable alternative and offers the opportunity to overcome the problems that are inherent in herbal extracts: misidentification, genetic and phenotypic variability, extract variability and instability, toxic components and contaminants. The use of controlled environments can overcome cultivation difficulties and could be a means to manipulate phenotypic variation in bioactive compounds and toxins. Conventional plant-breeding methods can improve both agronomic and medicinal traits, and molecular marker assisted selection will be used increasingly. There has been significant progress in the use of tissue culture and genetic transformation to alter pathways for the biosynthesis of target metabolites. Obstacles to bringing medicinal plants into successful commercial cultivation include the difficulty of predicting which extracts will remain marketable and the likely market preference for what is seen as naturally sourced extracts.
草药的消费十分普遍且呈增长趋势。作为原材料的主要来源，野生采摘正导致遗传多样性丧失和栖息地破坏。国内种植是一种可行的替代方案，有机会克服草药提取物固有的问题：误认、遗传和表型变异、提取物变异和不稳定性、有毒成分和污染物。利用可控环境可以克服种植困难，并且可能成为一种控制生物活性化合物和毒素表型变异的手段。传统的植物育种方法可以改善农艺性状和药用特性，分子标记辅助选择的应用也将越来越广泛。在利用组织培养和遗传转化改变目标代谢物生物合成途径方面已经取得了重大进展。将药用植物成功投入商业种植的障碍包括难以预测哪些提取物仍有市场需求，以及市场可能对天然来源提取物的偏好。
