Which plants would you choose to study for new drug discovery? A pipeline for a phylogenetic approach

There are almost 400,000 recognized plant species, each one containing different molecules that may have useful effects on the human body. Considering this diversity, the use of a strategic approach to identify the plants to investigate is crucial to efficiently discover therapeutic compounds. One of these approaches is the phylogenetic one, as closely related plant species tend to share biochemistry and medicinal properties. The aim of this work is to apply different phylogenetic methods to construct a pipeline useful for the selection of plants with high potential for drug research. Thus, a phylogenetic tree containing 32.223 species was downloaded, and lists of medicinal plants correlated with 12 diseases were obtained from the CMAUP medicinal plants database. Five monophyletic subtrees were extracted from the reference phylogenesis, and for all of them, for each plant list, the phylogenetic signal was measured using different methods. In the presence of phylogenetic signals, subsequent analyses were done to determine the exact position of phylogenetic clumping by identifying the hot nodes. The trees containing the species descending from the hot nodes were extracted, and those with more than 14 tips were plotted. From the analysis of the 12 lists, a total of 198 trees were plotted. These trees contain information about the plants identified by the method as having high potential in treating the disease. This work was able to apply a pipeline of different phylogenetic methods that can be used for the selection of potential plants for drug discovery.