Essential oil phytocomplex activity, a review with a focus on multivariate analysis for a network pharmacology-informed phytogenomic approach

Thanks to omic disciplines and a systems biology approach, the study of essential oils and phytocomplexes has been lately rolling on a faster track. While metabolomic fingerprinting can provide an effective strategy to characterize essential oil contents, network pharmacology is revealing itself as an adequate, holistic platform to study the collective effects of herbal products and their multi-component and multi-target mediated mechanisms. Multivariate analysis can be applied to analyze the effects of essential oils, possibly overcoming the reductionist limits of bioactivity-guided fractionation and purification of single components. Thanks to the fast evolution of bioinformatics and database availability, disease-target networks relevant to a growing number of phytocomplexes are being developed. With the same potential actionability of pharmacogenomic data, phytogenomics could be performed based on relevant disease-target networks to inform and personalize phytocomplex therapeutic application

Introduction to semantic e-Science in biomedicine

The Semantic Web technologies provide enhanced capabilities that allow data and the meaning of the data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries, better enabling integrative research and more effective knowledge discovery. This special issue is intended to give an introduction of the state-of-the-art of Semantic Web technologies and describe how such technologies would be used to build the e-Science infrastructure for biomedical communities. Six papers have been selected and included, featuring different approaches and experiences in a variety of biomedical domains

Network Pharmacology and Traditional Chinese Medicine

Gynaecology & obstetric

DNA Authentication of St John’s Wort (Hypericum perforatum L.) Commercial Products Targeting the ITS Region

open access articleThere is considerable potential for the use of DNA barcoding methods to authenticate raw medicinal plant materials, but their application to testing commercial products has been controversial. A simple PCR test targeting species-specific sequences within the nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region was adapted to screen commercial products for the presence of Hypericum perforatum L. material. DNA differing widely in amount and extent of fragmentation was detected in a number of product types. Two assays were designed to further analyse this DNA using a curated database of selected Hypericum ITS sequences: A qPCR assay based on a species-specific primer pair spanning the ITS1 and ITS2 regions, using synthetic DNA reference standards for DNA quantitation and a Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) assay separately targeting the ITS1 and ITS2 regions. The ability of the assays to detect H. perforatum DNA sequences in processed medicines was investigated. Out of twenty different matrices tested, both assays detected H. perforatum DNA in five samples with more than 103 ITS copies µL−1 DNA extract, whilst the qPCR assay was also able to detect lower levels of DNA in two further samples. The NGS assay confirmed that H. perforatum was the major species in all five positive samples, though trace contaminants were also detected

The Current and Future State of the Indian Pharmaceuticals Industry

India’s pharmaceuticals industry is growing at a very fast pace. At present, this industry is the second largest growing industry within India, and in terms of size, it is the third largest in the world, crossing the US$20 billion threshold by the year 2015. Having said so, the industry is also currently in a transition phase from process re-engineering (duplication of patented generic drugs) to new product research and development. This paper examines the current state of the industry as well as key future trends. Strengths and weaknesses of the industry are outlined, and potential risks to the industry are identified as well

IMass time: The future, in future!

Joseph John Thomson discovered and proved the existence of electrons through a series of experiments. His work earned him a Nobel Prize in 1906 and initiated the era of mass spectrometry (MS). In the intervening time, other researchers have also been awarded the Nobel Prize for significant advances in MS technology. The development of soft ionization techniques was central to the application of MS to large biological molecules and led to an unprecedented interest in the study of biomolecules such as proteins (proteomics), metabolites (metabolomics), carbohydrates (glycomics), and lipids (lipidomics), allowing a better understanding of the molecular underpinnings of health and disease. The interest in large molecules drove improvements in MS resolution and now the challenge is in data deconvolution, intelligent exploitation of heterogeneous data, and interpretation, all of which can be ameliorated with a proposed IMass technology. We define IMass as a combination of MS and artificial intelligence, with each performing a specific role. IMass will offer advantages such as improving speed, sensitivity, and analyses of large data that are presently not possible with MS alone. In this study, we present an overview of the MS considering historical perspectives and applications, challenges, as well as insightful highlights of IMass