Volume 3, Issue 2 (2023)

Natural-product research often treats botanical identity as though it were a single property that remains stable from a named species to the material placed in a biological assay. In practice, evidence may refer to a taxon, a defined plant part, a processed extract, a chromatographic fraction, an analytical feature, a candidate structure, or an isolated compound, and these objects are not evidentially interchangeable. This original classification article examines chemical identity as a provenanc

Herbal quality control often relies on one or a few marker compounds because they are measurable, stable, and compatible with routine specifications. Yet a marker can satisfy an assay without establishing that the correct botanical material is present, that the wider chemical profile is consistent, that measured constituents are relevant to biological potency, or that exogenous hazards are adequately controlled. This article develops an original, nonempirical standardization model that treats th

Specialized-metabolite profiles are widely used to compare plant taxa, support identification, and interpret evolutionary differentiation, yet the chemical profile measured from a specimen is not necessarily a fixed expression of species identity. It is an observation produced jointly by inherited metabolic capacity, tissue and cell specialization, developmental and inducible state, environmental exposure, sampling time, and the analytical workflow used to recover and annotate chemistry. This ar

Dereplication is often described as the recognition of known natural products before resources are committed to repeated isolation and structure elucidation. In contemporary discovery, however, consequential decisions are increasingly made while chemical identity remains incomplete. LC–HRMS features, molecular formulas, MS/MS similarities, predicted compound classes, ranked structural candidates, mixture-level NMR evidence, and taxonomic occurrence each provide different forms of information, wi

Potent phytochemicals can attract optimization effort before the properties that determine whether their activity can be translated into reproducible exposure, stable handling, tractable disposition, and sustainable material access are known. This article develops a proposed pre-optimization decision model for ranking such candidates across solubility, permeability, chemical stability, metabolic liability, and supply constraints without collapsing these dimensions into a single drug-likeness sco

Medicinal-plant authentication is increasingly challenged by substitution, undeclared admixture, processing-related signal loss, compositional variability, and deliberate manipulation of routine quality-control markers. DNA-based, chromatographic, spectroscopic, and chemometric approaches are often discussed as competing solutions, although they measure different properties and do not support identical identity claims. A systematic review of peer-reviewed Q1 journal literature published from 201

Endophytic fungi are repeatedly presented as alternative producers of medicinal-plant natural products, yet the evidential basis of producer attribution varies from culture-based chemical detection to isotope tracing, genome analysis, transcriptional association, and functional pathway testing. This critical review examines what these different observations can and cannot establish about metabolite origin. The central problem is that the same chemical phenotype may arise through independent micr