Metabolism and bioavailability aspects of natural products of plant origin using mass spectrometry-based and metabolomic approaches.
Mikropoulou EV, Basdeki A, Halabalaki M
Medicinal Plants
Many herbal remedies your grandmother swore by are only now getting the scientific tools needed to explain why they work — and whether the gut bacteria unique to you might change how well a plant compound actually reaches your bloodstream.
Plants have given us many medicines, but scientists still struggle to understand how these plant compounds travel through our bodies after we eat or take them. New high-tech instruments can now identify and track thousands of plant chemicals at once, far faster than before. A key insight is that the bacteria living in our gut can dramatically change plant compounds — sometimes making them more powerful, sometimes less — and this has been largely ignored until now.
Key Findings
The review covers 43 years of research (1982–2025) and finds that pharmaceutical companies have increasingly abandoned natural products despite their structural diversity, due to isolation difficulty, patenting hurdles, and sustainability concerns.
Gut microbiota interactions with plant compounds are critical for how the body absorbs and processes them (ADME), yet this relationship remains largely understudied in clinical trials — which are scarce for natural products overall.
Advanced mass spectrometry instruments (Orbitrap, QTOF, FT-ICR) and techniques like molecular networking have dramatically accelerated plant compound identification, but their integration with big data analytics for drug prioritization remains underutilized.
chevron_right Technical Summary
A comprehensive review examines how cutting-edge mass spectrometry and metabolomics tools are transforming our ability to track how plant-derived medicines move through and are transformed by the human body, while highlighting that gut bacteria play an underappreciated role in determining whether herbal compounds actually reach their targets.
Abstract Preview
Covering: 1982 to 2025The therapeutic value of natural products (NPs) is well established, as evidenced by their rich ethnopharmacological history and the significant proportion of marketed drugs d...
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