The effect of developmental and environmental factors on secondary metabolites in medicinal plants

Secondary metabolites (SMs) of medicinal plants are the material basis of their clinically curative effects. They are also important indicators for evaluating the quality of medicinal materials. However, the synthesis and accumulation of SMs are very complex, which are affected by many factors including internal developmental genetic circuits (regulated gene, enzyme) and by external environment factors (light, temperature, water, salinity, etc.). Currently, lots of literatures focused on the effect of environmental factors on the synthesis and accumulation of SMs of medicinal plants, the effect of the developmental growth and genetic factors on the synthesis and accumulation of SMs still lack systematic classification and summary. Here, we have given the review base on our previous works on the morphological development of medicinal plants and their secondary metabolites, and systematically outlined the literature reports how different environmental factors affected the synthesis and accumulation of SMs. The results of our reviews can know how developmental and environmental factors qualitatively and quantitatively influence SMs of medicinal plants and how these can be integrated as tools to quality control, as well as on the improvement of clinical curative effects by altering their genomes, and/or growth conditions.