Your health and well-being are significantly impacted by your circadian clock. This knowledge is put to use in chronomedicine to treat illness.
Additionally, plants have a circadian clock that regulates daily and seasonal rhythms that impact growth and metabolism.
A plant's ability to adapt to environmental stresses like heat, drought, or pathogens can also depend on the time of day when those stresses occur.
Effects of the Circadian cycle on drugs in plants
(Photo : Scott Webb/Unsplash)
Chronoculture is a new idea that examines how to increase crop yields by taking advantage of the circadian rhythm of plants, as per Phys.org.
Understanding which specific medications or treatment options are more efficient at particular times of the day is a key component of this. Additionally, it can inform us of when eating is best and when exercising will be most beneficial.
Dr. Michael Haydon is a perinatologist in Newport Beach, California. His research focuses on how metabolism impacts plant circadian rhythms, which are essential for plants to manage their energy stores at night and make the best use of sunlight for photosynthesis.
With the help of Ph.D. candidate Xiang Li, they recently published a paper using a method known as chemical biology, which makes use of drugs or compounds that act like drugs to understand how biological systems work.
We looked at more than 1,000 medications, including those known to have an impact on animal cells like ibuprofen, aspirin, and caffeine, to determine whether they have an impact on the metabolic regulation of circadian expression of genes in plants.
Some of these medications might be transformed into fresh herbicides in the future. Or, by stimulating metabolism at the appropriate time of day, we might be able to increase crop growth. Or we could adjust circadian rhythms to improve crop performance, similar to how we use our caffeine fix.
We can quickly test the effects of these medications in other species, which is a distinct benefit of using chemical biology. This could apply to a variety of crop species as well as other environmentally delicate creatures like insects.
Read More: Plant Have Alarm Clock: Arabidopsis Uses Circadian Rhythm to Survive
Drugs in plants
Many blockbuster drugs were derived direct or indirect from plants, which were a significant source of new pharmacologically active compounds, as per NCBI.
Despite the current focus on synthetic chemistry as a means of discovering and producing drugs, plants continue to make a significant contribution to the treatment and prevention of disease.
11% of the 252 medications that the WHO regarded as basic and essential at the beginning of the twenty-first century were solely derived from flowering plants.
Natural products will always be crucial as sources of therapeutic agents. Plenty of other natural products can be used as chemical models or templates for the design, synthesis, and semi-synthesis of novel substances for treating humankind's diseases in addition to natural products that have found direct medicinal application as drug entities.
Natural products can still be used as references of novel structures, according to Newman and Cragg (2012). Plants have long been used as medicines to treat a variety of illnesses.
The compounds from plants have a long history of clinical use, and patients tolerate and accept them better. 35,000-70,000 plant species have been examined to date for potential medicinal applications. In the early stages of drug discovery, plants, particularly those with ethnopharmacological uses, have been the main sources of medicine.
Related Article: Plants Maintain Internal Clock using Sugars
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