Economic potential and conservation of medicinal and aromatic plants from Brazil

Approximately 2/3 of the biological diversity of the world is estimated to be in tropical zones, mainly in developing countries. With nearly 55,000 native species, Brazil is considered the country with the greatest biodiversity on the planet. These species are distributed over six major distinct biomes: Amazon (30,000); Cerrado (7,000); Caatinga (4,000); Atlantic rainforest (16,000), Pantanal (10,000) and the subtropical forest (3,000) Serious efforts to collect and preserve the genetic variability of medicinal plants have been initiated in Brazil. The National Center for Genetic Resources and Biotechnology - Cenargen, in collaboration with other research centers of Embrapa (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation), and several universities, has a program to establish germplasm banks for medicinal and aromatic species Very few germplasm collections have been established in Brazil. Most consist of a large number of species, with few accessions. The concept of a germplasm, bank wih many species and accessions, including their different varieties, chemotypes and close related species is greatly needed. Few collections have started to treat their medicinal and aromatic plants as a germplasm. bank. Rather the collections are more similar to the inclusion of accessions as used in botanical gardens. These collections are starting to more extensively gather additional plants to enrich their genetic variability of major species. A few species have been recognized as priority for germplasm conservation, and some of these are described in this paper. This paper illustrates some of the vast potential of Brazilian flora. It is an enormous task to elaborate a program for genetic resource conservation of these species, which require multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary collaboration. These collections will have an important role in the future, providing genetic material for chemical characaterization, breeding of new crops, improving our understanding of secondary metabolism, and in preserving an important part of our cultural and national heritage pathways.