Bioknowledgy of the Ecuadorian Flora. Some medicinal plants and their uses.

Presentation

The Korea Institute of Biosciences and Biotechnology (KRIBB) maintains a permanent collaboration with the School of Biological Sciences of the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador (PUCE) since 2016. The objective of this cooperation is to contribute to the conservation of biodiversity through the generation of new knowledge and its responsible use.

With these premises the project Exploration of biological resources from Ecuador in the framework of international collaborative research is developed. The main goal is to deepen the knowledge of some useful plant species, contemplating activities that allow the identification of bioactive capacities of these plants.

The project comprises two stages: the first one ended with the printed publication of this book – now presented in digital version – which includes the collection of information on some useful plants that grow in the forests surrounding the Yasuni Scientific Station, located within the Yasuni National Park. Some data on the ancestral uses found in the literature are also included. The second stage consists in exploring the possible uses of the extracts of these plants that are now known to have bioactive properties. A selection of these species is presented in this work. The aim is to discover new bioactive properties and new uses in the future. This process, although nothing simple, will surely take some years to produce results that can be transferred in such a way that they are useful for society. It is clear that the ancestral knowledge is respected throughout this process, as well as national and international regulations that apply to these cases.

This book presents information on 30 of the 80 species investigated and, as mentioned above, forms a basis for other explorations related to the uses of plants and their applications for the benefit of society in general.

Introduction

The use of medicinal plants to treat human ailments is a practice that began thousands of years ago and although it is not clear when it started, it surely began with the first humans noticing the habits of animals and, through a process of trial and error, they would have come to understand the effects of plants on humans. In the 16th cen­tury, during the Renaissance, great scientific, commercial and medical interest in plants emerged. This was not only as a result of the will to recover the lost drugs used in ancient Greek and Roman medicine, but also due to the explorations in the New World.

With the emergence of science, research and the need to know, a crucial element as far as medicinal plants are concerned, are the so-called ancestral knowledge. Since It has established the basis for initiating formal