Industrial Crops & Products 203 (2023) 117210 Available online 27 July 2023 0926-6690/© 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Bamboos as a cultivated medicinal grass for industries: A systematic review Ankush D. Sawarkar a , Deepti D. Shrimankar a , Manish Kumar b , Phani Kumar d , Lal Singh b, c, * a Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (VNIT), Nagpur, Maharashtra 440010, India b CSIR, National Environmental and Engineering Research Institute (CSIR-NEERI), Nagpur, Maharashtra 440020, India c Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR), Ghaziabad 201002, India d Defence Food Research Laboratory, Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), Siddhartha Nagar, Mysuru 570011, Karnataka, India A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Bamboo salt Phytosterol Sustainable Bioprospecting Pharmaceuticals Agricultural sector ABSTRACT Bamboos are considered to be non-timber forest products (NTFPs). Habitat of Bamboos are distributed across the world except in extremely cold areas such as the Atlantic and some European regions. Since ancient times, Bamboos have been playing a significant role in preparation of therapeutics, especially in Asian countries like China, Japan, and India. Bamboo possesses high macro and micro nutrients such as protein, fiber, essential minerals and amino acids. Bamboo-derived products have high demand in the market, such as bamboo-salt, bamboo-dietary silica, bamboo-charcoal soap, bamboo-tea, Banslochan, bamboo-vinegar, and many more. These Bamboo products have been used to treat various health problems such as, obesity, inflammation, heart disease, hypertension, arteriosclerosis, etc. Scope of present review is to compile existing information relevant to Bamboo products, medicinal importance, and its industrial applications. Literature was gathered from peer reviewed journals, websites, books, thesis, and scientific reports from 1995 to 2022. The distribution and characteristics of bamboo species that are used as medicinal plants, their chemical composition, and different methods used for making different bamboo products were reviewed. The distribution pattern of different bamboo genus, including Bambusa, Dendrocalamus, Gigantochloa, Phyllostachys, and Sasa were also a part of the present review. Present study comprehensively illustrates the utilization of various bamboos species having medicinal/ therapeutic potentials and recommendation to commercialize the bamboo products for future prospectus. 1. Introduction Bamboo is a large gramineous plant with woody stalks up to 40 m in height, and up to 20 cm in diameter (Scurlock et al., 2000), and distributed across the globe with 1707 species belonging to 128 genera (Nayak and Mishra, 2016; Sawarkar et al., 2020; Vorontsova et al., 2016). Bamboo is one of the fastest growing timber plants on the earth, which can grow up to 1 m per day, and one of them being Bambusa oldhamii Munro, which grows about 4 feet per day (Wu et al., 2011). The Bamboo forest occupied 36-million-hectares (MH) area across the globe, out of which, India covers 16 MH area, followed by China (6.5 MH) and Brazil (4 MH) (Forest Survey of India (FSI), 2019; INBAR, 2019). India, China and Brazil contributes highest biodiversity of bamboo species with more than 1000 species (Forest Survey of India (FSI), 2019; Sawarkar et al., 2021; Singhal et al., 2013) (Table 1). The bamboo mainly consists of three tribes viz., Arundinarieae, Bambuseae and Olyr- eae. Among these, the Bambuseae tribe is distributed in the majority of the places with a total of 976 species, followed by Arundinarieae and Olyreae with 581 and 123 species, respectively (Triplett et al., 2014; Yormann et al., 2020). According to the Food and Agriculture Organi- zation (FAO), about 40% of population i.e., approximately 2.5 billion people are economically depending on bamboo; further, it provides shelter to at least one billion people in the form of the traditional bamboo house (Maxim Lobovikov et al., 2007). Moreover, 80% of world’s populations are depending on NTFP’s for their day-to-day needs such as livestock, fuel wood, furniture’s, etc (Charlotte et al. (2021); Scurlock et al., 2000; Singhal et al., 2013; Trujillo and L´ opez, 2020). Bamboo has excellent physical, chemical, and mechanical proper- ties, due to which it is a very famous in its commercial application. These properties can be further modified or enhanced by applying thermal (100–1700 ◦ C) (Kalali et al., 2019; Luan et al., 2022), and chemical treatments to make final bamboo material with mildew-proofing, du- rable, and as per the scale of industry utilization (Gao et al., 2020; Liu et al., 2019; Tang et al., 2019). This superior property made it very useful and has more than 1500 documented applications from different sectors like food (Nirmala et al., 2018; Sawarkar et al., 2023) (Table 2), * Corresponding author at: CSIR, National Environmental and Engineering Research Institute (CSIR-NEERI), Nagpur, Maharashtra 440020, India. E-mail address: lalsingh@neeri.res.in (L. Singh). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Industrial Crops & Products journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/indcrop https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indcrop.2023.117210 Received 23 November 2022; Received in revised form 18 July 2023; Accepted 23 July 2023