Recent trends in research into African medicinal plants.

Recent trends in research into African medicinal plants show that while ethnobotanical surveys continue, there is an appreciable increase in research activity in the area of bioactivity of natural products. The biological areas most researched include antimicrobial, molluscicidal, toxicity tests and antitumour in decreasing order. The isolation and characterisation of natural products from African plants without biological testing has yielded several compounds of novel structure and constitutes the majority of all the recent publications on African medicinal plants.