looking for biologics in plants is really nothing new. Done intelligently, you're exploiting 4.5 billion years worth of pre-optimization. Done poorly, you're selling herbal supplement snake oil with no oversight or meaningful regulation.
The last big hit was about a half-century ago, too, so it's no magic bullet. [1,2]
>natural products aren’t dead, by any means. But they aren’t an untouched gold mine, either.
You'll get interesting hits, but the overall success rate for developing a reasonable drug out of them is still about 2% overall.
Sometimes (see: tramadol[0]), you can also confuse reuptake with production, and wind up concluding the wrong thing.
> Done poorly, you're selling herbal supplement snake oil with no oversight or meaningful regulation.
For obvious reasons though, the plants and mushrooms with the longest histories of antibiotic use tend to be the easiest to identify. I find it generally really difficult to learn new species from field guides, but most of the stuff with antibiotic properties is pretty trivial to identify even without joining your local mycological association or native plant society.
E.g. plantago, one of the plants they are making a big deal about in the article, is almost certainly growing within a hundred yards of wherever you happen to be if you're anywhere in North America, Europe, or Asia. So yeah, while it's completely criminal that big box retailers are allowed to sell fake herbal medicines with impunity, I also think that people generally have a moral obligation to learn something about their local plants and fungi anyway.
Absolutely. Just look in the grass of any park, or in any vacant lot, or even near the base of many street trees. Basically it's impossible to go anywhere with disturbed soil or grass without finding them.
The last big hit was about a half-century ago, too, so it's no magic bullet. [1,2] >natural products aren’t dead, by any means. But they aren’t an untouched gold mine, either.
You'll get interesting hits, but the overall success rate for developing a reasonable drug out of them is still about 2% overall.
Sometimes (see: tramadol[0]), you can also confuse reuptake with production, and wind up concluding the wrong thing.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tramadol#Pin_cushion_tree [1]: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/04/19/gri... [2]: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/01/04/pla...