Plant secondary metabolites (PSMs) are essential for human health and are the building blocks of many pharmaceuticals. Indeed, PSMs account for 25% of all medications. Access to natural resources, particularly medicinal plants, remains one of the ongoing hurdles for the drug discovery and pharmaceutical industry. Even if they exhibit biological hits, endangered animals barred from collecting large samples are more severely affected by this bottleneck. Cultivating the organism outside its typical habitat may be possible, but this is not always possible. A solution may be to cultivate pharmaceutically exciting plant species. Abiotic stressed plants offer a viable alternate source for novel medication development. Plants may defend themselves by creating a variety of PSMs to resist abiotic environmental stresses.
In most cases, plants either create new chemicals from scratch or boost the concentration of already-existing ones, such as the well-known bioactive lead compounds morphine, camptothecin, catharanthine, epicatechin-3-gallate (EGCG), quercetin, resveratrol, and kaempferol. Most PSMs are plant defence compounds with anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties, produced under diverse abiotic stress conditions. Terpenoids, alkaloids, and phenolic chemicals are the three main PSM categories. Animals’ health benefits and production increase when they consume forages with PSMs in pastures and rangelands. This has significance for improving meat and dairy biochemical richness for human consumption. Producers may be able to manage their lands more effectively, use fewer inputs, and have less environmental impact. This is if they better grasp PSMs and their functional roles in agroecology. PSMs to maintain a healthy human and animal population and a robust ecosystem are covered in this review paper.