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Nanotechnology + Glycobiology + Herbalism = Xymetri
Herbalism, also known as herbal
medicine, herbology, and phytotherapy, is a folk and
traditional
medicinal practice based on the use of
plants and
plant extracts.
Utilizing the healing properties of plants is an
ancient practice. People in all continents have long
used hundreds, if not thousands, of indigenous
plants for treatment of various ailments dating back
to prehistory. There is evidence that sugests
Neanderthals living 60,000 years ago in present-day
Iraq used plants for medicinal purposes (found at a
burial site at Shanidar Cave, Iraq, in which a
Neanderthal man was uncovered in 1960. He had been
buried with eight species of plants)
[1] These plants are still widely used
in ethnomedicine around the world. These plants are
still widely used in
ethnomedicine around the world.
The first generally accepted use of plants as
healing agents was depicted in the cave paintings
discovered in the
Lascaux caves in France, which have been
Radiocarbon dated to between 13,000 - 25,000
BC.
Anthropologists theorize that over time, and with
trial and error, a small base of knowledge would
have been acquired within early tribal communities.
As this knowledge base expanded over the
generations, the specialized role of the
herbalist emerged. The process would likely
have occurred in varying manners within a wide
diversity of cultures.
Plants have an almost limitless ability to
synthesize
aromatic substances, most of which are
phenols or their oxygen-substituted
derivatives such as
tannins. Most are
secondary metabolites, of which at least
12,000 have been isolated, a number estimated to be
less than 10% of the total. In many cases, these
substances (esp.
alkaloids) serve as plant defense mechanisms
against predation by microorganisms, insects, and
herbivores. Many of the herbs and spices used
by humans to season food yield useful medicinal
compounds.
The use of and search for drugs and dietary
supplements derived from plants have accelerated in
recent years. Pharmacologists, microbiologists,
botanists, and natural-products chemists are combing
the Earth for phytochemicals and leads that could be
developed for treatment of various diseases. In
fact, many modern drugs have been derived from
plants.
The use of
herbs to treat
disease is almost universal among
non-industrialized societies. A number of traditions
came to dominate the practice of herbal medicine in
the
Western world at the end of the
twentieth century:
Nanotechnology
is a field of applied science and technology
covering a broad range of topics. The main unifying
theme is the control of matter on a scale smaller
than one
micrometre, as well as the fabrication of
devices on this same length scale. It is a highly
multidisciplinary field, drawing from fields such as
colloidal science,
device physics, and
supramolecular chemistry. Much speculation
exists as to what new science and technology might
result from these lines of research. Some view
nanotechnology as a marketing term that describes
pre-existing lines of research applied to the
sub-micron size scale.
Despite the apparent simplicity of this definition,
nanotechnology actually encompasses diverse lines of
inquiry. Nanotechnology cuts across many
disciplines, including
colloidal science,
chemistry,
applied physics,
biology. It could variously be seen as an
extension of existing sciences into the nanoscale,
or as a recasting of existing sciences using a
newer, more modern term. Two main approaches are
used in nanotechnology: one is a "bottom-up"
approach where materials and devices are built from
molecular components which
assemble themselves chemically using
principles of
molecular recognition; the other being a
"top-down" approach where nano-objects are
constructed from larger entities without
atomic-level control.
Glycobiology is
the study of structure, biosynthesis and biology of
saccharides (sugar chains or glycans)that are widely
distributed in nature.
The central paradigm driving the modern revolution
in molecular biology has been that biological
information flows from DNA to RNA to protein. The
power of this concept lies not only in its
template-driven precision, but also in the ability
to manipulate any one class of molecules based upon
knowledge of another, and in the patterns of
sequence homology and relatedness that predict
function and reveal evolutionary relationships.
With the completion of the genomic sequences of
humans and several other commonly studied "model"
organisms, one can anticipate even more spectacular
gains in understanding biological systems. Given
this success story, there is a tendency to assume
that the study of DNA, RNA, and proteins will
elucidate all of the important mechanisms of
biology.
In fact, creating cells and organisms requires two
other major classes of molecules, lipids and sugars.
These can serve as critical intermediates in
generating energy, as signaling molecules, as
structural components, or as determinants of
cellular interactions. All cells and many proteins
in nature are covered with a dense and complex array
of covalently attached sugar chains (called
oligosaccharides or glycans).
The biological roles of these glycans become
particularly important in constructing complex
multicellular organs and organisms, a process which
requires interactions of cells with one another, and
with the surrounding extracellular matrix. Since
most classes of glycans are on the outer surface of
cellular and secreted macromolecules, they are in an
optimal position to modulate or mediate a variety of
events in cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions
that are crucial to the development and function of
a complex multicellular organism.
They are also in a position to mediate interactions
between organisms, e.g., between host and parasite.
In addition, simple, rapidly turning-over
protein-bound glycans are abundant in the nucleus
and cytoplasm, where they appear to serve as
regulatory switches. The chemistry, biochemistry and
biology of sugars were matters of very prominent
interest in the first half of the 20th century.
However, during the initial phase of the modern
revolution in molecular biology in the 1970s and
80s, studies of glycans lagged behind those of the
other major classes of molecules.
This was in large part due to the inherent
structural complexity of glycans, the difficulty in
easily determining their sequence, and the lack of
in-depth information about the genetic control of
their biosynthesis.
The development of a variety of new technologies for
exploring the structures of these chains and the
cloning of most of the major genes involved in
synthesizing them has now opened up a new frontier
of molecular and cellular biology called
glycobiology (a term coined in 1988 by Rademacher,
Parekh, and Dwek).
Since that time a very broad spectrum of functions
have been revealed for glycans.
Thus, glycobiology is also an integrative science,
crossing all subfields of chemistry, biology, and
medicine, in relation to all aspects of the
structure, biosynthesis and function of glycans. |
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