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

With nearly 400,000 known plant species, each one containing its wide range of molecules, the use of a strategic approach to identify the plants to investigate is crucial to efficiently discover therapeutic compounds. One approach 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 taken from literature and five monophyletic subtrees were extracted for the analyses. Lists of medicinal plants correlated with 12 diseases and 12 biological activities were downloaded respectively from the CMAUP database and the Dr. Duke's Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical databases. For each, 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. 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.