Abstract
Plants secondary metabolites that are essential for plant survival in its environment are a useful resource for drug discovery in the area of combination therapy. Desert plants, in particular, have a lot to offer; they experience stress conditions and activation/repression of pathways that lead to biosynthesis of unique compounds.
The current knowledge on the effectiveness of combination therapy as compared to single treatment support the use of active plant-derived extracts or fractions composed of several metabolites.
A set of metabolites, termed "metabolite signature", within an active fraction, will serve as a guide in the process of desert plants domestication. The combination of modern methods of transcriptome, proteome and metabolome analyses with precision agriculture, will pave the way to produce sustainable plant biomass for pharmaceutical industries.