DOI: https://doi.org/10.55373/mjchem.v26i4.123

Keywords: Essential oil; antiviral; bioactive compound; medicinal plant; natural product

Abstract

The utilization of essential oils, a group of biologically active natural compounds, has garnered significant attention due to their multifaceted health-promoting attributes. The potential health benefits of essential oils may be subject to modulation by the unique chemical composition inherent to each plant species. The lipophilic nature of essential oils enables them to readily traverse the viral membrane, leading to the subsequent disruption and rupture of the said membrane. Essential oils usually have bioactive compounds that can act on different parts of a virus, including the virus’s entry into a cell, transcription, translation, and assembly. The purpose of this review is to characterize the biological and therapeutic properties of medicinal plants’ essential oils towards various viral infections. Findings show that most previous research reported the antiviral properties of essential oils through various inhibition of viruses. The present discourse endeavors to elucidate the traditional utilization of a diverse array of 44 distinct botanical species, as documented in a comprehensive compilation of 33 scholarly investigations, in the context of mitigating a multitude of viral infections. The data collected for the current review were obtained through the PubMed database only. In conclusion, essential oils of every type of medicinal plants could be considered as natural therapeutic agents for the treatment of viral infections. Therefore, essential oils of these medicinal plants have a great potential to be developed for modern medicinal use.