Abstract
Bioactive secondary metabolites represent a wide range of different chemical compounds, but the three major classes are nitrogen-containing compounds, phenols, and terpenes. Artemisinin, produced by Artemisia annua L. (sweet wormwood, annual wormwood, sweet annie, sweet sagewort) belongs to the terpenes group. Artemisinin is a sesquiterpene lactone with an endoperoxide bridge (Liu et al., 1979), and is very bioactive against chloroquine-resistant strains of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum (Klayman, 1985). Today, combination therapies containing artemisinin are recommended as the first-line treatment for malaria in 77 out of 80 countries and amounted to 311 million treatments worldwide in 2015 (WHO, 2015).
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Artemisia Annua : Prospects, Applications and Therapeutic Uses |
| Publisher | CRC Press |
| Publication date | 2017 |
| Pages | 131-154 |
| Chapter | 7 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781138632103 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781351802864 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2017 |
