Bioactive compounds in Agricultural and food production waste

The use of natural products from plants and foodstuffs as medicines or as a part of the medicinal approach has been recorded since ancient times. These medicines constituted key components of traditional medicines in the form of extracts, powders, potions and oils. However, they relied on combination of very complex and matrix-imbedded combinations of compounds, rather than on pure and individual compounds themselves. Today the pure components of these compounds are products predominantly identified as secondary plant metabolites. Interest in these compounds as potential drug-leads could be incorporated in new aspects of pharmaceutical design and as such pose significant new areas of development. This is mainly due to their very diverse structure when compared to the standard combinatorial chemistry, which allows the discovery of predominately low-molecular-weight lead compounds. From this perspective, current modern-medicine can be identified as having its own foundation based on the more traditional medicine approach (Naumovski 2015).