A massive international initiative to decode the genetic blueprints of over one thousand medicinal herbs is advancing our understanding of how plants produce therapeutic compounds. The One Thousand Herb Genomics (1KHG) Project, announced by Professor Shilin Chen and colleagues at Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine on July 2, 2022, has brought together 103 research groups from 67 universities or institutes to sequence 1254 traditional medicinal organisms, including 1210 medicinal plants and fungi from 162 families and 44 medicinal animals from 24 families.

According to the World Health Organization, approximately 80% of the global populations relies on medicinal plants and their traditional medicines for healthcare. A global estimation suggests that 50 000–70 000 medicinal plants are being used worldwide to aid in various ailments. Despite this vast therapeutic potential, research on most medicinal plants has largely focused on phytochemical extraction, while the molecular and genetic mechanisms associated with medicinal uses remain unexplored. The lack of genetic and biosynthetic information has hindered identifying unknown phytochemicals and their biosynthesis in most medicinal plants.

The 1KHG Project aims to bridge this gap. To date, the genomes of over 164 medicinal plants have been published, including those of Allium sativum, Artemisia annua, Coptis chinensis, Ginkgo biloba, Panax ginseng, Punica granatum, Salvia miltiorrhiza, and Zingiber officinale. The project established a publicly available database in 2021, which by May 2025 had been visited more than 1.2 million times by scientists from China, the United States, Sweden, Germany, Canada, Japan, and Singapore.

Sequencing 1254 herb genomes including 1210 medicinal plants and fungi and 44 medicinal animals is a state-of-the-art project that will be instrumental to understanding therapeutic mechanisms of diverse medicinal plants. The scientific aims include developing a genomic database of global medicinal herbs, building representative models of medicinal plants, promoting elucidation of biosynthesis of plant secondary metabolites with significant medicinal values, understanding the significance of plant secondary metabolism in plant evolution, and enhancing the development of synthetic biology of plant secondary metabolism to preserve natural resources especially endangered species.

The significance of this project is that the sequencing data will be shared with all other countries, thus providing a global service in understanding and enhancing the use of medicinal plants. The completion of over one thousand herb genomes will advance knowledge of plant secondary metabolism and accelerate the discovery of novel medicinal compounds. By generating high-quality genome sequences of over 1000 medicinal plants, the 1KHG Project will provide a powerful genomic resource for elucidating biosynthetic pathways of both known and unknown terpenoids, flavonoids, and nitrogen-containing secondary metabolites that form the chemical basis of many traditional medicines.

The paper “One Thousand Herb Genomes: Advancing Plant Secondary Metabolism Research in the Post-Omics Era,” is authored by De-Yu Xie. Full text of the open access paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eng.2025.12.001. For more information about Engineering, visit the website at https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/engineering.