**3. Integrated "OMICS" techniques for enhancing its therapeutic potential**

Plants act as factories that synthesises wide array of nutritional and secondary metabolites with complex structure and functions. Essentially, therapeutic/pharmaceutical secondary metabolites are often extensively isolated and purified from wild plant species or under-utilised crops as compared to cultivated species. However, the chemical synthesis of these medicinally important metabolites is a daunting challenge and is not economically feasible. Recent advancement in the system biology tools have pave the way to exaggerate their synthesis in tissue culture plants, but still their applications are limited to certain plant species because of the complex nature of technological standardisation in respective crops and lack of proper understanding of biosynthetic pathway. In this section, we will be discussing recent advancements made in the system and synthetic biology tools to provide detailed glimpse of the biosynthetic pathways and to explore the unprecedented possibilities of their application for the human welfare. These cutting-edged technologies can be successfully exploited for the improvement/enhancement of secondary metabolites production or could also help in the identification of novel metabolites in cultivated plants as well.
