Natural products, the continuous source of therapeutic molecules for various diseases: literature landscape analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Wai Kan Yeung ◽  
Andrei Mocan ◽  
Nikolay T. Tzvetkov ◽  
Karel Šmejkal ◽  
Elke H. Heiss ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Products ◽  
Natural Product ◽  
Healthcare Professionals ◽  
Web Of Science ◽  
Relevant Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Natural Product Research ◽  
Therapeutic Molecules ◽  
Number Of Citations ◽  
Continuous Source

Background: Substances present in nature have been a continuous source for the development of drugs for cardiovascular and infectious diseases, cancer, and many other diseases. As the literature concerning these natural products grows, it becomes more difficult for a reader to quickly grasp the essential facts and develop a well-informed impression of this field of research. Until now, it has also been difficult to determine which natural products and research objectives were receiving the most attention as measured by number of citations. Objective: The current study of all published articles concerned with natural products sought to identify which natural products and which research objectives are connected with the major contributors to scientific journals based on the number of relevant publications and the number of times each publication was cited elsewhere. Methods: Bibliometric data, including citation data, were extracted from the Web of Science database using the search string TS=(“natural product*)” and analyzed by the VOSviewer software. Results: The search yielded 63,194 articles, with more than half of the manuscripts published since 2012. The ratio of original articles to reviews was 5.8:1. The major contributing countries were the United States, China, Germany, Japan, and India. Articles were published mainly in journals focused on chemistry, pharmacology or biochemistry. Curcumin, resveratrol, and terpenoids were the most frequently cited natural products. Conclusion: The results of the current study provide researchers from different backgrounds and healthcare professionals with a brief overview of the major trends in natural-product research in the form of a citation-based summary of the relevant literature.

scholarly journals A Novel Marine Natural Product Derived Pyrroloiminoquinone with Potent Activity against Skin Cancer Cells

Marine Drugs ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (8) ◽  
pp. 443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaden Cowan ◽  
Mohammad Shadab ◽  
Dwayaja H. Nadkarni ◽  
Kailash KC ◽  
Sadanandan E. Velu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Products ◽  
Side Effects ◽  
Skin Cancer ◽  
Cancer Cells ◽  
Natural Product ◽  
The United States ◽  
Marine Natural Product ◽  
Migration And Invasion ◽  
Migration Assay ◽  
Lead Compounds

Non-melanoma skin cancer is one of the major ailments in the United States. Effective drugs that can cure skin cancers are limited. Moreover, the available drugs have toxic side effects. Therefore, skin cancer drugs with less toxic side effects are urgently needed. To achieve this goal, we focused our work on identifying potent lead compounds from marine natural products. Five lead compounds identified from a class of pyrroloiminoquinone natural products were evaluated for their ability to selectively kill squamous cell carcinoma (SCC13) skin cancer cells using an MTT assay. The toxicity of these compounds was also evaluated against the normal human keratinocyte HaCaT cell line. The most potent compound identified from these studies, C278 was further evaluated for its ability to inhibit cancer cell migration and invasion using a wound-healing assay and a trans-well migration assay, respectively. To investigate the molecular mechanism of cell death, the expression of apoptotic and autophagy proteins was studied in C278 treated cells compared to untreated cells using western blot. Our results showed that all five compounds effectively killed the SCC13 cells, with compound C278 being the most effective. Compound C278 was more effective in killing the SCC13 cells compared to HaCaT cells with a two-fold selectivity. The migration and the invasion of the SCC13 cells were also inhibited upon treatment with compound C278. The expression of pro-apoptotic and autophagy proteins with concomitant downregulation in the expression of survival proteins were observed in C278 treated cells. In summary, the marine natural product analog compound C278 showed promising anticancer activity against human skin cancer cells and holds potential to be developed as an effective anticancer agent to combat skin cancer.

scholarly journals A practical guide for transparent reporting of research on natural products in the British Journal of Pharmacology : Reproducibility of natural product research

2020 ◽  
Vol 177 (10) ◽  
pp. 2169-2178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angelo A. Izzo ◽  
Mauro Teixeira ◽  
Steve P.H. Alexander ◽  
Giuseppe Cirino ◽  
James R. Docherty ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Products ◽  
British Journal ◽  
Natural Product ◽  
Practical Guide ◽  
Transparent Reporting ◽  
Natural Product Research

scholarly journals Ecopharmacognosy: Exploring The Chemical And Biological Potential Of Nature For Human Health

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey A. Cordell
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Natural Products ◽  
Drug Discovery ◽  
Natural Product ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Biologically Active ◽  
Minor Role ◽  
Natural Product Research ◽  
Biological Potential ◽  
The World

“Why didn’t they develop natural product drugs in a sustainable manner at the beginning of this century?”  In 2035, when about 10.0 billion will inhabit Earth, will this be our legacy as the world contemplates the costs and availability of synthetic and gene-based products for primary health care?  Acknowledging the recent history of the relationship between humankind and the Earth, it is essential that the health care issues being left for our descendants be considered in terms of resources. For most people in the world, there are two vast health care “gaps”, access to quality drugs and the development of drugs for major global and local diseases.  Consequently for all of these people, plants, in their various forms, remain a primary source of health care.  In the developed countries, natural products derived from plants assume a relatively minor role in health care, as prescription and over-the-counter products, even with the widespread use of phytotherapeutical preparations.  Significantly, pharmaceutical companies have retrenched substantially in their disease areas of focus.  These research areas do not include the prevalent diseases of the middle- and lower-income countries, and important diseases of the developed world, such as drug resistance. What then is the vision for natural product research to maintain the choices of drug discovery and pharmaceutical development for future generations?  In this discussion some facets of how natural products must be involved globally, in a sustainable manner, for improving health care will be examined within the framework of the new term “ecopharmacognosy”, which invokes sustainability as the basis for research on biologically active natural products.  Access to the biome, the acquisition, analysis and dissemination of plant knowledge, natural product structure diversification, biotechnology development, strategies for natural product drug discovery, and aspects of multitarget therapy and synergy research will be discussed.  Options for the future will be presented which may be significant as countries decide how to develop approaches to relieve their own disease burden, and the needs of their population for improved access to medicinal agents.

scholarly journals Development of an agar-plug cultivation system for bioactivity assays of actinomycete strain collections

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (11) ◽  
pp. e0258934
Author(s):  
Nico Ortlieb ◽  
Elke Klenk ◽  
Andreas Kulik ◽  
Timo Horst Johannes Niedermeyer
Keyword(s):  
Natural Products ◽  
Natural Product ◽  
Microtiter Plate ◽  
Growth Media ◽  
Natural Product Research ◽  
Solid Media ◽  
Agar Plug ◽  
Strain Collection ◽  
Actinomycete Strain ◽  
Initial Medium

Natural products are an important source of lead compounds for the development of drug substances. Actinomycetes have been valuable especially for the discovery of antibiotics. Increasing occurrence of antibiotic resistance among bacterial pathogens has revived the interest in actinomycete natural product research. Actinobacteria produce a different set of natural products when cultivated on solid growth media compared with submersed culture. Bioactivity assays involving solid media (e.g. agar-plug assays) require manual manipulation of the strains and agar plugs. This is less convenient for the screening of larger strain collections of several hundred or thousand strains. Thus, the aim of this study was to develop a 96-well microplate-based system suitable for the screening of actinomycete strain collections in agar-plug assays. We developed a medium-throughput cultivation and agar-plug assay workflow that allows the convenient inoculation of solid agar plugs with actinomycete spore suspensions from a strain collection, and the transfer of the agar plugs to petri dishes to conduct agar-plug bioactivity assays. The development steps as well as the challenges that were overcome during the development (e.g. system sterility, handling of the agar plugs) are described. We present the results from one exemplary screening campaign targeted to identify compounds inhibiting Agr-based quorum sensing where the workflow was used successfully. We present a novel and convenient workflow to combine agar diffusion assays with microtiter-plate-based cultivation systems in which strains can grow on a solid surface. This workflow facilitates and speeds up the initial medium throughput screening of natural product-producing actinomycete strain collections against monitor strains in agar-plug assays.

scholarly journals Bibliometric analysis of scientific production on academic writing: a study of the last 10 years

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (3C) ◽  
pp. 200-209
Author(s):  
Julio E. Postigo-Zumarán ◽  
Lorena Jessica Nova Revilla ◽  
Fanny Esperanza Zavala Alfaro ◽  
Dennis Arias-Chávez
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Web Of Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
English For Academic Purposes ◽  
Scientific Production ◽  
Publish Or Perish ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Number Of Publications ◽  
Number Of Citations

The objective of the study is to characterize the world scientific production on academic writing between the years 2011 to July 2021. A bibliometric study was carried out in five databases (Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic and Crossref). Bibliometric indicators were analyzed in 4117 articles through Publish or Perish v. 7.19 and the same analytical software of the chosen databases. The results indicate that the article entitled “Codemeshing in academic writing: Identifying teachable strategies of translanguaging” is the document with the highest number of citations; Montserrat Castelló Badía, the most cited author; Journal Of English For Academic Purposes stands out as the medium with the largest number of publications on the subject; and among the countries that concentrate the largest production on creative writing, the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Australia and Spain stand out. It is concluded that the rate of publications will increase in the following months, which means continuing to periodically carry out measurements on scientific production to determine the evolution and contributions of the scientific material produced.

scholarly journals The Top 100 Most Highly Cited Original Articles on Immune and Gut Microbiota

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaicheng Wen ◽  
Lin Tao ◽  
Yue Zhu ◽  
Siming Zhou ◽  
Zhengbo Tao ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Gut Microbiota ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Web Of Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
Intestinal Wall ◽  
Host Immune System ◽  
National Academy Of Sciences ◽  
University Of Colorado ◽  
Number Of Citations ◽  
Highly Cited

Abstract BackgroundCrosstalk between the gut microbiota and the host immune system is related to multiple diseases, and in recent years, this crosstalk has gradually become a research hotspot. Because the research involves many diseases, the mechanisms are extremely complicated, so both the screening out of the high-quality articles from the massive amount of literature and the in-depth interpretation of their data are helpful in guiding the direction of research.MethodsIn this study, the top 100 most highly cited original articles were obtained from a total of 43,858 papers. According to the number of citations in the Web of Science database, the results are sorted in descending order. One may download the data obtained by Web of Science into tab-delimited (Win) format and import it into VOSviewer (Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands) for subsequent bibliometric analysis. We summarized the country, institution, journal, author and other indicators for all publications. Through the online bibliometric platform, we analyzed the publication volume and growth trends for different countries/regions. VOSviewer was used to classify keywords into different clusters based on co-occurrence analysis and color them according to the time course. ResultsThe number of citations for each article ranged from 914 to 5,460, and the most cited manuscript was written by PJ Turnbaugh and RE Ley. Washington University, the University of Colorado and Harvard University performed well in terms of the quality and quantity of publications. Manuscripts in NATURE, PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA and SCIENCE were the most influential. In addition, we identified six clusters of hotspots in the field of gut microbiota and immunity research.ConclusionsObesity and diabetes are the diseases most related to the gut microbiota, and their pathogenesis may be associated with a change in intestinal wall permeability and an imbalance of Bacteroides and Firmicutes. The balance of energy metabolism plays a key role in the crosstalk between host immunity and intestinal microbiota.

scholarly journals Type S Non Ribosomal Peptide Synthetases for the rapid generation of tailor-made peptide libraries

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadya Abbood ◽  
Tien Duy Vo ◽  
Jonas Watzel ◽  
Kenan A. J. Bozhueyuek ◽  
Helge B. Bode
Keyword(s):  
Natural Products ◽  
Natural Product ◽  
De Novo ◽  
Chemical Space ◽  
Biologically Relevant ◽  
Peptide Synthetases ◽  
Medical Needs ◽  
Natural Product Research ◽  
Rapid Generation ◽  
Traditional Natural

Bacterial natural products in general, and non-ribosomally synthesized peptides in particular, are structurally diverse and provide us with a broad range of pharmaceutically relevant bioactivities. Yet, traditional natural product research suffers from rediscovering the same scaffolds and has been stigmatised as inefficient, time-, labour-, and cost-intensive. Combinatorial chemistry, on the other hand, can produce new molecules in greater numbers, cheaper and in less time than traditional natural product discovery, but also fails to meet current medical needs due to the limited biologically relevant chemical space that can be addressed. Consequently, methods for the high throughput generation of new-to-nature natural products would offer a new approach to identifying novel bioactive chemical entities for the hit to lead phase of drug discovery programms. As a follow-up to our previously published proof-of-principle study on generating bipartite type S non-ribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSs), we now envisaged the de novo generation of non-ribosomal peptides (NRPs) on an unreached scale. Using synthetic zippers, we split NRPS in up to three subunits and rapidly generated different bi- and tripartite NRPS libraries to produce 49 peptides, peptide derivatives, and de novo peptides at good titres up to 145 mgL-1. A further advantage of type S NRPSs not only is the possibility to easily expand the created libraries by re-using previously created type S NRPS, but that functions of individual domains as well as domain-domain interactions can be studied and assigned rapidly.

A Recent Look into Natural Products that have Potential to Inhibit Cholinesterases and Monoamine Oxidase B: Update for 2010-2019

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (9) ◽  
pp. 862-876
Author(s):  
Hayrettin O. Gulcan ◽  
Ilkay E. Orhan
Keyword(s):  
Natural Products ◽  
Monoamine Oxidase ◽  
Natural Product ◽  
Biological Activities ◽  
Treatment Options ◽  
Monoamine Oxidase B ◽  
Chemical Structures ◽  
Natural Agents ◽  
Natural Product Research ◽  
Multiple Receptors

With respect to the unknowns of pathophysiology of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD)-, and Parkinson’s Disease (PD)-like neurodegenerative disorders, natural product research is still one of the valid tools in order to provide alternative and/or better treatment options. At one hand, various extracts of herbals provide a combination of actions targeting multiple receptors, on the other hand, the discovery of active natural products (i.e., secondary metabolites) generally offers alternative chemical structures either ready to be employed in clinical studies or available to be utilized as important scaffolds for the design of novel agents. Regarding the importance of certain enzymes (e.g. cholinesterase and monoamine oxidase B), for the treatment of AD and PD, we have surveyed the natural product research within this area in the last decade. Particularly novel natural agents discovered within this period, concomitant to novel biological activities displayed for known natural products, are harmonized within the present study.

scholarly journals Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage: Bibliometric Overview

Religions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amador Durán-Sánchez ◽  
José Álvarez-García ◽  
María del Río-Rama ◽  
Cristiana Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Growth Stage ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Web Of Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
Annual Increase ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Advanced Search ◽  
Religious Tourism ◽  
Number Of Citations

This paper reviews the academic literature related to religious tourism through a bibliometric study and citations of articles indexed in the multidisciplinary database Web of Science (WoS). Through an advanced search by terms, a representative set of 103 documents that form the ad-hoc basis of the analysis were selected. In view of the results, it is concluded that the United States is at the forefront of research, with almost 20% of the articles affiliated to one of its centres, mainly university centres. Publications on religious tourism are currently in an exponential growth stage, supported by the annual increase in the number of citations received. These papers are published in a small number of journals well positioned in their JCR category, classified within the field of Social Sciences Research.

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