Introduction. Natural products especially from plants have been widely used in folk medicine to avoid the
serious side effects of the conventional chemotherapeutic drugs. Many reasons have been put forward to
explain the success of natural products in drug discovery – such as their high chemical diversity, the
effects of evolutionary pressure to create biologically active molecules and the structural similarity of
protein targets across many species. However, the vast majority of the world’s natural compounds have not
been tested for biological activity and several novel sources of biodiversity are potentially available [1].
Other unexplored sources of natural products from foodstuffs and drinks that could be searched for drug
leads have also been highlighted [2].