Synergy and antagonism in natural product extracts: when 1 + 1 does not equal 2
Covering: 2000 to 2019 According to a 2012 survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 18% of the U.S. population uses natural products (including plant-based or botanical preparations) for treatment or prevention of disease. The use of plant-based medicines is even mor...
Saved in:
| Published in | Natural product reports Vol. 36; no. 6; pp. 869 - 888 |
|---|---|
| Main Authors | , |
| Format | Journal Article |
| Language | English |
| Published |
England
Royal Society of Chemistry
19.06.2019
|
| Subjects | |
| Online Access | Get full text |
Cover
Loading…
| Summary: | Covering: 2000 to 2019
According to a 2012 survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 18% of the U.S. population uses natural products (including plant-based or botanical preparations) for treatment or prevention of disease. The use of plant-based medicines is even more prevalent in developing countries, where for many they constitute the primary health care modality. Proponents of the medicinal use of natural product mixtures often claim that they are more effective than purified compounds due to beneficial "synergistic" interactions. A less-discussed phenomenon, antagonism, in which effects of active constituents are masked by other compounds in a complex mixture, also occurs in natural product mixtures. Synergy and antagonism are notoriously difficult to study in a rigorous fashion, particularly given that natural products chemistry research methodology is typically devoted to reducing complexity and identifying single active constituents for drug development. This report represents a critical review with commentary about the current state of the scientific literature as it relates to studying combination effects (including both synergy and antagonism) in natural product extracts. We provide particular emphasis on analytical and Big Data approaches for identifying synergistic or antagonistic combinations and elucidating the mechanisms that underlie their interactions. Specific case studies of botanicals in which synergistic interactions have been documented are also discussed. The topic of synergy is important given that consumer use of botanical natural products and associated safety concerns continue to garner attention by the public and the media. Guidance by the natural products community is needed to provide strategies for effective evaluation of safety and toxicity of botanical mixtures and to drive discovery in botanical natural product research.
This report documents the cellular, molecular, and analytical methods used to identify combination effects in complex natural product mixtures. |
|---|---|
| Bibliography: | Dr Nadja Cech is Patricia A. Sullivan Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). She has had a lifelong interest in the use of plants for medicine, stemming from her involvement as a child in establishing one of the world's largest medicinal plant and seed companies, a company still operated by her family today. Dr Cech leads a dynamic research group at UNCG, for which a major focus in the development of metabolomics as a tool to understand synergy and complexity in biologically active botanical natural products. This work has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health for more than 15 years, and was awarded the Jack L. Beal Award from the Journal of Natural Products in 2011. Dr Cech is a member of the Center of Excellence for Natural Product Drug Interaction Research, and Co-Director of the Medicinal Chemistry Collaborative Dr Lindsay Caesar completed her PhD in analytical chemistry and natural product discovery from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is currently finishing her work in the laboratory of Professor Nadja Cech at UNCG where she is developing bioinformatic approaches to understand the complexities of botanical medicines. Dr Caesar is a National Institutes of Health T32 Fellow. Her research focuses on the development of mass spectrometric and multivariate statistical approaches to evaluate synergy in complex mixtures to facilitate the discovery of bioactive compounds. https://mcsquared.uncg.edu/ . ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 ObjectType-Review-3 content type line 23 |
| ISSN: | 0265-0568 1460-4752 1460-4752 |
| DOI: | 10.1039/c9np00011a |