Metabolomics is a dynamic and rapidly evolving field that provides insights into primary and secondary metabolites present in any living organism. It creates unique chemical fingerprints of the cell metabolism and sheds light about pathological disease conditions, progress of treatment options, establishment of new therapies or validation of traditional treatments. Typical hyphenated separation and detection techniques applied in metabolomic studies are GC-MS, LC-MS, LC-NMR, or GC-NMR, which are often followed by computational analysis and data processing using different statistical tools. The modern research platform that are now available to researchers enable a fast and reliable determination of mechanisms of action behind plant extracts, the monitoring of diseases biomarkers and last but not least the selection of active principles in crude plant extracts or herbal mixtures.
With a growing number of studies providing evidence on the activity of natural remedies from ethnobotanical resources, the field ethnopharmacology is becoming an important and decisive area of interest. Experimental assessments of medicines used in traditional knowledge need to be coupled with the use of modern chromatographic and spectroscopic techniques that are supported with bioinformatic software. Such an integrated approach is an important step when aiming to bridge the gap between between tradition and science. Tools like statistical discriminative analysis, pathway analysis, molecular networking, or enrichment analysis represent the portfolio of modern metabolomics.
This Research Topic welcomes Original Research and Review articles dealing with the application of metabolomics in an ethnopharmacological context and is intended to provide a platform for researchers to present the most recent advances in the assessment of ethnobotanical resources.
The following themes are of interest, including but not limited to:
• Metabolomic exploration of active principles found in complex extracts as active medical products.
• Methods for quantifying active metabolites in such products.
• Characteristics of metabolites resulting from the microbial and enzymatic transformation of such products in disease models.
• Targeted and untargeted monitoring of disease treatment with such complex extracts.
• Determination of underlying mechanisms of action of the associated active metabolites.
• Determination of biomarkers coming from such complex extracts.
Important note: Original Research based solely on in silico techniques will not be considered for review in Ethnopharmacology.
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All the manuscripts submitted to the collection will need to fully comply with the
Four Pillars of Best Practice in Ethnopharmacology (you can freely download the full version
here).