Traditional medicinal plants used in the treatment of viral diseases

Nowadays, theoretical chemistry has experienced a great advance in the search for drugs for the treatment of various human and animal pathologies. Although it is expected that medicinal plants constitute a great source for the research of compounds, the present study has been carried out to provide a list of important plants that can be explored in the research of antiviral compounds. The main objective is to search for medicinal plant(s) that can be used to treat various viral pathologies; in other words, the search for broad spectrum antiviral plants. Thus, several articles of synthesis, original research, systematic review on antiviral plants from different countries are consulted in this study. A total of 694 species of medicinal plants from 152 families were extracted from the literature against 17 virus families including Adenoviridae, Alloherpesviridae, Arteriviridae, Birnaviridae, Coronaviridae, Flaviviridae, Herpesviridae, Nimaviridae, Orthomyxoviridae, Papillomaviridae, Parvoviridae, Picornaviridae, Poxviridae, Reoviridae, Retroviridae, Togaviridae. The most cited families of plants are Fabaceae (11.38%), Lamiaceae (5.90%), Asteraceae (5.61%), Rubiaceae (3.45%) and Euphorbiaceae (3.02%). The three (3) most cited species that can treat several viral diseases are Allium sativum, Azadirachta indica and Zingiber officinale. These plants can be a starting point for antiviral drug research and the compounds already isolated from these plants can be subject to molecular docking in order to explore their antiviral potential.