Abstract:
Medicinal plants have always played a key part in health care. In fact, plants represent an
enormous pool of new, undiscovered, and bioactive molecules. Therefore, ethnopharmacological
and ethnobotanical studies are essential to discover new substances for the treatment of diseases.
The Vernonia genus has about one thousand species and members of the genus are widely used
as food and medicine. The plant-derived triterpenoids are commonly used for medicinal purposes
in many countries, because they possess various pharmacological properties. A large number of
triterpenoids are known to exhibit cytotoxicity against a variety of tumor cells as well as anticancer
efficacy in preclinical animal models. Therefore this review presents an overview of Vernonia
species with their biological potential, ethnomedicinal uses and the triterpenoids isolated from this
genus. This will help to identify the state of ethnopharmacological knowledge in regard to this
genus and to propose future research priorities.
