Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has been practiced in China for thousands of years. As
a complementary and alternative treatment, herbal medicines that are frequently used in the TCM are the
most accepted in the Western world. However, animal materials, which are equally important in the
TCM practice, are not well-known in other countries. On the other hand, the Chinese doctors had documented
the toxic profiles of hundreds of animals and plants thousand years ago. Furthermore, they saw
the potential benefits of these materials and used their toxic properties to treat a wide variety of diseases,
such as heavy pain and cancer. Since the 50s of the last century, efforts of the Chinese government and
societies to modernize TCM have achieved tremendous scientific results in both laboratory and clinic. A
number of toxic proteins have been isolated and their functions identified. Although most of the literature
was written in Chinese, this review provide a summary, in English, regarding our knowledge of the
clinical use of the toxic proteins isolated from a plant, Tian Hua Fen, and an animal, scorpion, both of
which are famous toxic prescriptions in TCM.
An overlooked UV spectroscopic tool for sensing coil-to-helix and helix-to-coil conformational transitions of proteins and peptides
