Bioactive properties of native Australian medicinal plants

Abstract

Due to biogeographic isolation the Australian flora has evolved in distinctive and often unique ways to elaborate a vast repository of secondary metabolites many of which are not found elsewhere in the world. Furthermore, the particularly long history of Aboriginal settlement and empirical traditional medicine has provided useful ethnopharmacological leads for biomedical research. In this chapter we examine bioactives associated with compounds isolated from key plant species of established economic and commercial importance as well as providing a summary of recent research identifying compounds of future therapeutic potential using indigenous medical ethnobotany as a primary lead in plant selection.