Supercritical fluids (SCFs) are increasingly replacing the organic solvents, e.g., n-hexane, chloroform, dichloromethane, or methanol, that are conventionally used in industrial extraction, purification, and recrystallization operations because of regulatory and env ...
Currently, there is a growing interest in the study of natural products, especially as part of drug discovery programs. Secondary metabolites can be extracted from a variety of natural sources, including plants, microbes, marine animals, insects, and amphibians. This chapter focuses pr ...
Natural products play a vital role in drug discovery. They have served as the basic reference and initiators in drug discovery programs. Natural products as pure compounds have been involved in western medicine as drugs or lead compounds for drug discovery and development. In traditional me ...
Natural products, well known for unique chemical diversity and bioactivity, have continued to offer templates for the development of novel scaffolds of drugs. With the remarkable developments in the areas of separation science, spectroscopic techniques, microplate-based ultr ...
Follow-up of natural products isolation refers to re-isolation of compound(s) of interest in larger amounts for further pharmacological testing, conclusive structure elucidation, structure modifications to synthesize analogs for structure–activity relationships ( ...
Scaling-up is a way of increasing the quantity without losing the quality. The scaling-up is not always straightforward as the yield of the target compound becomes more important. The factors that influence scaling-up in a medium scale are outlined in this chapter. An example of a scale-up is also pr ...
Phenolic compounds constitute a major class of plant secondary metabolites that are widely distributed in the plant kingdom and show a large structural diversity. These compounds occur as aglycones or glycosides, as monomers or constituting highly polymerized structures, or as free ...
Due to their special structural features, extraction and isolation of saponins poses a serious challenge. Conventional methods have been explored as well as the recent, relatively greener, efficient, solvent-economic, time-saving, newer methods of extraction. Both traditional ...
A technique where a separation technique is coupled with an online spectroscopic detection technology is known as hyphenated technique, e.g., GC–MS, LC–PDA, LC–MS, LC–FTIR, LC–NMR, LC–NMR–MS, and CE–MS. Recent advances in hyphenated analytical techniques have remarkably widened their ...
Chromatography is a process for the separation of compounds from the mixtures. Gas chromatography (GC) is one of the most important and common techniques in separation science. The main focus of this chapter is to demonstrate a hands-on approach to preparative gas chromatography (Prep-GC) t ...
Preparative HPLC (prep-HPLC) has emerged as a mainstay of natural products isolation and purification. The various modes available to date, e.g. normal phase, reversed-phase, size exclusion, and ion exchange, can be used to purify most classes of natural products. This chapter presents an ov ...
Bioinformatics is the rational study at an abstract level that can influence the way we understand biomedical facts and the way we apply the biomedical knowledge. Bioinformatics is facing challenges in helping with finding the relationships between genetic structures and functions, ...
We here describe the application of novel programs that allow definition of phylogenetic relationships in transport protein superfamilies. These programs are used to provide information about the four major superfamilies of secondary carriers that include members that export ...
Transporter proteins are expressed throughout the human body in different vital organs. They play an important role to various extents in determining absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity (ADME/Tox) properties of therapeutic molecules. Over the past de ...
Plasma membrane transporter proteins play an important role in taking up nutrients into and effluxing xenobiotics out of cells to sustain cell survival. In the last decade, a number of studies have shown that these physiologically important transporters affect absorption, distribu ...
Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) boasts many advantages over microarrays. For instance, very low amounts of total RNA are required to yield highly accurate and reproducible detection of transcript levels. As a consequence, qRT-PCR has become a popular technique for assessing gene e ...
Resistance to multiple drugs is a serious limitation to chemotherapy treatment of human cancers. In addition, many clinically useful drugs show limited uptake in the intestine and cannot gain access to the brain. Three multidrug efflux pumps of the ABC superfamily (P-glycoprotein/ABC ...
The blood–brain barrier (BBB) is the cellular structure between the blood flowing through the brain and the parenchymal tissues of the brain. This physiological barrier is formed by the endothelial cells of the capillary walls. It exquisitely regulates the passage of substances into and out ...
Vesicular monoamine transporters (VMATs) are involved in the presynaptic packaging of monoaminergic neurotransmitters into storage granules. Upon an action potential, vesicles release their contents into the synaptic cleft via exocytosis. Since insufficient or excess re ...
Flow cytometry can sensitively detect and efficiently sort cells based on fluorescent signals integrated into cellular markers of proteins or DNA. It has been broadly applied to assess cell division, apoptosis and to isolate cells including stem cells. As the seeds for tumorigenesis and m ...

