phytochemistry
Quick Summary
Phytochemistry is the study of the chemistry of plants, their processes, and their products. It is a subdiscipline of organic chemistry that focuses on chemical compounds found naturally in plants, known as phytochemicals. These compounds can have various roles, including imparting color, such as the chlorophylls in plants or the bilins found in red algae and green plants. Phytochemistry has been crucial in identifying plant substances with medicinal importance and has led to the development of chemotaxonomy, which uses biochemical differences between species to aid in plant classification.1234
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