ABSTRACT

Plants have provided man with all his needs in terms of' shelter, clothing, food, flavours and fragrances as not the least. medicines. Plants have formed the basis of sophisticated Traditional Medicine (TM) systems that ha e been in existence for thousands of' years and continue to provide mankind with remedies (Gurib-lakini. 2006). According to Arias (1999). a medicinal plant is: I ) Any plant employed as a source of' drugs and/or their precursors or 2) Any plant used in order to relieve, prevent or cure disease or to alter physiological and pathological process. A phytopharmaceutical preparation or herbal medicine is any manufactured medicine obtained exclusively from plants (aerial and non-aerial parts, juice, resins and oil), either in crude state or as a pharmaceutical formulation (Rates. 2001). Nearly 50,000 species of higher plants have been used for medicinal supposes. They are also used in cleaning, personal care and perfumery. In S\ stems of traditional healing, major pharmaceutical drugs has been either derived from or patterned alter compounds from biological diversity (Bisset, 1994). In spite of the surge of activity in synthetic chemistry over the past 20 years or so, about 850 small molecules introduced as drugs were derived from plants sources (Fowler,2006).