LAUSR

Traditional medicine (TM) plays an important role in the healthcare system and is increasingly used worldwide for managing various chronic diseases and promoting well-being. Although huge progresses have been achieved to reveal major compounds in well-known botanical drugs, such as Salvia miltiorrhiza Bunge, the identification of major active constituents remains extremely challenging due to the complexity of chemical composition and the elusive mechanisms of action. One major barrier to solving such problems is the lack of feasible techniques and strategies to distinguish those active compounds from those which make no or only a minor contribution to the activity of TM. Often ubiquitous or widely distributed compounds are then claimed to be “actives” for major disease conditions. Moreover, it is difficult to judge whether certain components or compounds identified by a specific cellular model or target-based assays can exert a pharmacological effect in vivo in the context of biological network or in a real-life clinical setting. Therefore, it is time to dedicate greater efforts in either improving the capability of bioassays or developing novel paradigms to refresh our toolbox for dissecting TMs. The aim of this research topic is to improve the quality of such studies, accelerate the pace of screening and identification of active compounds from TMs, and to facilitate the expansion of screening assays from cellular tissue levels to organs and in vivomodels. In the past 3 decades, bioactivity-guided screening has become a mainstream workflow for lead discovery from TMs. With the aid of modern analytical approaches such as LC-MS, GC-MS, and NMR, it allows us to identify multiple constituents in active components found by phenotypes or target-based assays. However, synergistic effects among multiple compounds of TMs are difficult to recognize during conventional phytochemical isolation, which requires repeated purification steps to obtain a single compound from mixtures of TM. In this research topic, four articles are dedicated to develop novel analytical or preparing approaches to uncover the chemical composition of TM. Nie et al. used the emerging microscopic mass spectrometry imaging technique to reveal the distribution of phytochemicals in the dried root of Isatis tinctoria L. With the aid of the chemometric method, different samples from four habitats were successfully clustered. Chang YX and co-workers Yang et al. established a rapid high throughput vibration and vortex-assisted matrix solid phase dispersion method for simultaneous extraction of four isoflavones from Glycine max (L.) Merr. With satisfied recovery and a linear range, the approach was applied in the quality control of SSP. Edited and reviewed by: Michael Heinrich, University College London, United Kingdom