No abstract

Chalcones belong to the flavonoid class of phenolic compounds. They form one of the largest groups of bioactive natural products. The potential anticancer, anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, antioxidant, and antiparasitic properties of naturally occurring chalcones, and their unique chemical structural features inspired the synthesis of numerous chalcone derivatives. In fact, structural features of chalcones are easy to construct from simple aromatic compounds, and it is convenient to perform structural modifications to generate functionalized chalcone derivatives. Many of these synthetic analogs were shown to possess similar bioactivities as their natural counterparts, but often with an enhanced potency and reduced toxicity. This review article aims to demonstrate how bioinspired synthesis of chalcone derivatives can potentially introduce a new chemical space for exploitation for new drug discovery, justifying the title of this article. However, the focus remains on critical appraisal of synthesized chalcones and their derivatives for their bioactivities, linking to their interactions at the biomolecular level where appropriate, and revealing their possible mechanisms of action.

No abstract

Immunoslot blot assays have been used for the analysis of many DNA adducts but problems are frequently encountered in achieving reproducible results. Each step of the assay has been systematically examined and it was found that the major problems are in the DNA fragmentation step and the use of the manifold apparatus. Optimisation was performed upon both the malondialdehyde-deoxyguanosine adduct (M 1 dG) and the O 6 -carboxymethyldeoxyguanosine adduct (O 6 CMdG) to demonstrate the applicability to other DNA adducts.Blood samples from the EPIC study (n = 162) were analysed for M 1 dG adducts and the data showed no correlation with adduct levels in other tissues indicating that the EPIC blood samples were not useful for studying M 1 dG adducts. Blood samples from a processed meat vs vegetarian diet intervention (n = 6) were analysed for O 6 CMdG and many were below the limit of detection. The reduction of background adduct levels in standard DNA was investigated using chemical and whole-genome amplification approaches. The latter gave a sensitivity improvement of 2.6 adducts per 10 7 nucleotides for the analysis of O 6 CMdG.Subsequent reanalysis for O 6 CMdG showed a weakly significant increase in O 6 CMdG on the processed meat diet compared with the vegetarian diet, demonstrating that further studies are warranted.

Novel, reproducible, and accurate LC/MS/MS methods were developed for the determination of the urinary content of O(6)CMG and O(6)CMdG, and of the possible formation of O(6)MeG and O(6)MedG by decarboxylation. Clinical samples from volunteers on different diets were analysed. Further studies are required to discover a link between the presence of these biomarkers in urine and red meat consumption.