Saffron, a Potential Bridge between Nutrition and Disease Therapeutics: Global Health Challenges and Therapeutic Opportunities
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Date
2024-05
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Abstract
Plants are an important source of essential bioactive compounds that not only have a
beneficial role in human health and nutrition but also act as drivers for shaping gut microbiome.
However, the mechanism of their functional attributes is not fully understood despite their signif icance. One such important plant is Crocus sativus, also known as saffron, which possesses huge
medicinal, nutritional, and industrial applications like food and cosmetics. The importance of this
plant is grossly attributed to its incredible bioactive constituents such as crocins, crocetin, safranal,
picrocrocin, and glycosides. These bioactive compounds possess a wide range of therapeutic activities
against multiple human ailments. Since a huge number of studies have revealed negative unwanted
side effects of modern-day drugs, the scientific communities at the global level are investigating a
large number of medicinal plants to explore natural products as the best alternatives. Taken into
consideration, the available research findings indicate that saffron has a huge scope to be further
explored to establish alternative natural-product-based drugs for health benefits. In this review, we
are providing an update on the role of bioactive compounds of saffron as therapeutic agents (human
disorders and antimicrobial activity) and its nutritional values. We also highlighted the role of omics
and metabolic engineering tools for increasing the content of key saffron bioactive molecules for
its mass production. Finally, pre-clinical and clinical studies seem to be necessary to establish its
therapeutic potential against human diseases.