Computer-Aided Drug Discovery Studies in Ethiopian Plant Species

Since ancient times, plants with therapeutic properties play a major role and are used as medicine by several groups of people all over the world. Ethiopia can be considered a hub of medicinal plants due to their diverse species and traditional usage by the local people. Medicinal plants in Ethiopia hold high therapeutic value and hence, most of them are preserved and saved from extinction. Also, most of the plants are yet to be studied due to a lack of documentation and experimental validation. Secondary metabolites from these plants possess numerous pharmacologically active compounds. Computer-aided drug discovery using Artificial Intelligence and high throughput technologies saves time and is more cost-efficient than traditional clinical studies. In this chapter, we discuss the computational studies done on ten important Ethiopian medicinal plants that have antioxidant, antimicrobial, anticancer and antidiabetic properties using phytochemical analysis and In-silico approach for plant-based drug development, which could serve as a potential pharmacological lead against different disease targets.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence, Antioxidant, Anticancer, Antimicrobial, Drug discovery, Ethiopia medicinal plants, In-silico, Molecular docking.