Medicinal and Aromatic Plants of Oman

Medicinal plants have received an impetus recently due to revival of attention in natural products in form of herbal medicines demanding convincing knowledge on their phytochemistry, status, cultivation, and utilization. Medicinal plants in the Sultanate of Oman have tremendous potential in terms of ethnomedicinal and food applications. However, these treasures of Oman have not been fully explored until recently. Several medicinal plants indigenous to Oman have been used for several centuries in form of traditional medicine for the prevention and treatment of diseases. The first volume of this book uncovers information about sustainable use of selected medicinal plants, their phytochemistry and efforts made to conserve them to ensure continued supply. This volume reveals systematic information about 104 promising medicinal plants in Oman with botanical names, common names, synonyms, local names, family, habitat and distribution, chemical constituents, cultivation and collection, pharmacological activity, uses (a. common uses; b. traditional uses; therapeutic uses), toxicity and clinical data, status, patents, and their marketed products or industrial application. Each of the 104 plants has a high-resolution color photograph, plant description, and location. The chapters are written by well-experienced authors in the field. A uniform chapter structure throughout this book has been designed to keep consistency. This book is especially valuable to academicians, phytochemists, pharmacologists, herbalists, agriculturists, biotechnologists, natural product researchers, and industrialists involved in the production of herbal drugs. Salient features of this book include: ?t provides common uses, traditional uses, and therapeutic uses of 132 medicinal plants. It uncovers the detailed phytochemistry of each medicinal plant. It offers systematic information about their geographical distribution and current status of these plants. Updated information about the pharmacology, mechanisms of action, and toxicity of these plants is mentioned in detail. Overall, this book provides an overview of botanical description, geographical distribution, chemical composition and uses of the medicinal plant's endemic to Sultanate of Oman. Many of the plants listed in this book-particularly in Volume One-are endemic, near-endemic, or regionally endemic medicinal and aromatic species of Oman, which remain largely unexplored and are supported by limited scientific literature. Due to this scarcity of information, the authors have included relevant data from closely related species within the same genus. This approach enables readers to better understand the chemistry, taxonomy, and potential uses of the respective species in the context of their taxonomic relatives.