Genomics Approach of the Natural Product Pharmacology for High Impact Diseases
1State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, USA
2Shanghai University of TCM, Shanghai, China
3Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing, China
4Emory University, Atlanta, USA
5University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA
Genomics Approach of the Natural Product Pharmacology for High Impact Diseases
Description
In recent years, natural product medicine has drawn great attention from people around the world and has been playing important roles in the prevention and treatment of high impact diseases (HID). Natural products are a great source of therapeutic agents and nearly a quarter of patent drugs are extracts or derivatives of natural products. For example, artemisinin is an extract from sweet wormwood. In 2015, Youyou Tu won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Medicine for her discovery of artemisinin in the treatment of malaria.
Investigations of the pharmacological mechanisms of these natural products or their extracts have been hampered by the fact that natural products are of complex composition. A single herbal plant may have dozens of active components that has diverse effects on various pathways in different organs and tissues of the patients.
Recent progress in high throughput technologies, including genomic sequencing, transcriptome, proteomics, and metabolomics techniques, has enabled the use of whole-genome approaches to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the pharmacological mechanisms of natural product medicine. High throughput technologies are especially useful for illustrating the multicomponents and multitargets mode of actions by natural products. This issue will be a collection of gems demonstrating how these omics approaches are shaping our current understanding of natural products at the genomic level.
Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:
- Application of genomics approaches on natural products
- Pharmacological study of natural products on HID using omics technologies
- Toxicity evaluation of natural products by high throughput in vivo or in vitro studies
- Omics based research (genomics, metagenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, etc.) of ingredients or monomers from natural products in basic or clinical research
- Studies using new methodological paradigms that challenge current genomics analysis of natural products