Traditional Chinese Medicines: Molecular Structures, Natural Sources, and Applications

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Traditional medicines derived from natural sources have played an important role in the treatment of disease in China since ancient times. The use of such medicine over such a long period has resulted in the development of a large body of knowledge on the relationships between natural products and their biological activities. Thisknowledge, written in Chinese, has been anecdotal and has never been fully available in English. In the last 30 years, many of the active principles in plant medicines have been isolated and characterized in laboratories around the world. At the same time, a systematic effort has been undertaken in the Chinese Academy of Sciences to identify the structure-activity relationships that result from the application of the disciplines of both chemistry and medicine to these databases. This volume is the first systematic description of the chemical structures of compounds active in traditional Chinese medicines to be published in the English language. The book contains data on some 7,000 chemicals isolated from 1,000 plants that are used in Chinese medicine. The chemistry of the major active components of each plant and the mode of action of the medicines are described in this exhaustively indexed reference. It should be valuable to medicinal chemists seeking new drug leads, to biologists and chemists studying biochemical mechanisms, to clinicians seeking an understanding of traditional Chinese medicines and to the lay public, whose interest in alternative medicine continues to deepen.