Current Scenario and Challenges in Cultivation of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants

Abstract

Today, growing medicinal and aromatic plants (MAPs) is not only a highly viable way of stopping their over-collection, which allows rare endemic vulnerable and endangered species to survive and maintain their natural genetic diversity, but the economic sector of MAPs, at the same time, providing the supply of food, pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries with high quality raw materials, is also very significant. Typically, medicinal plants are viewed as minor crops and most of them tend to face serious challenges in domestication and cultivation on small, medium and large scales. These challenges relate to cultivation technology as well as to market and price changes. Unlike wild gathered raw materials, the herbal trade is choosing cultivated MAPs more and more because it is easier to control the plant's productivity, quality and pharmacological content. There are different factors, like the profitability of cultivating medicinal plants being compared with that for production of standard field crops, for which a specialized apparatus exists and a uniform technique is used for application of fertilizers and agrochemicals to control weeds, pests and diseases. To be able to compete in the international market, and against wild plants, high quality raw material should be produced using low input cultivation methods. The most familiar problems producers of medicinal plants face are market, abundance and accessibility of wild populations, agro- environmental conditions, labor availability and costs, investments in machinery, post- harvest processing, and profitability of production. According to genotypes is very important for profitable production of the high quality medicinal plants' row material. Only a small percentage of cultivated medicinal plant species is clearly genetically defined and represented on the seed market for variety. And other crops, traditional breeding methods, biotechnological procedures and selection assisted with molecular markers are used in development of new varieties and cultivars of MAP with the perspective of their desirable characteristics improvement. This means enhancing the output of a particular drug and the content of desired secondary metabolites in the plant. Identifying genes and DNA sequences linked to the biosynthesis of specific metabolite classes will be a future challenge in the breeding programs of medicinal and aromatic plants (MAPs). Presently, the focus of research is on the genetic diversity among different species of medicinal plants using various types of DNA markers, like restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP), amplified fragment length polymorphic DNA (AFLP), random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD), cleavage amplified polymorphic sequence (CAPS), simple sequence repeat (SSR), and sequence characterized amplified region (SCAR) markers. It is a well known fact that the main purpose for targeted alteration of traits in medicinal plants is the content of bioactive compounds. Though, for their use as crops, aspects of basic agronomy related to uniformity, stability, growth and development, and resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses, also need to be enhanced.