Emerging Applications of Metabolomics in Studying Chemopreventive Phytochemicals

Abstract

Abstract. Phytochemicals from diet and herbal medicines are under intensive investigation for their potential use as chemopreventive agents to block and suppress carcinogenesis. Chemical diversity of phytochemicals, together with complex metabolic interactions between phytochemicals and biological system, can overwhelm the capacity of traditional analytical platforms, and thus pose major challenges in studying chemopreventive phytochemicals. Recent progresses in metabolomics have transformed it to become a robust systems biology tool, suitable for examining both chemical and biochemical events that contribute to the cancer prevention activities of plant preparations or their bioactive components. This review aims to discuss the technical platform of metabolomics and its existing and potential applications in chemoprevention research, including identifying bioactive phytochemicals in plant extracts, monitoring phytochemical exposure in humans, elucidating biotransformation pathways of phytochemicals, and characterizing the effects of phytochemicals on endogenous metabolism and cancer metabolism.

The pharmaceutical industry and natural products: historical status and new trends

“…Data mining approaches to identify bioactive NPs in mixtures, from a library of terrestrial and marine organisms are currently being developed and will be essential for the development of effective multipleagent drugs from traditional medicines (Ngo et al 2013). Another aspect will be the assessment of the variation of the metabolome of body fluids in the framework of clinical trials, involving complex phytopharmaceutical or herbal preparations to completely assess the efficacy of such therapies though a systems Phytochem Rev (2015) 14:299-315 311 biology approach (van Wietmarschen et al 2009;Wang and Chen 2013).…”

Genistein and Glyceollin Effects on ABCC2 (MRP2) and ABCG2 (BCRP) in Caco-2 Cells

“…Such attention manifests in the public domain through the widespread use of dietary supplements that contain these chemicals [ 2 ] and in recommendations from public agencies to increase the consumption of fruits and vegetables because of the link between their consumption and cancer prevention [ 3 ]. In the scientific community, efforts to identify these chemicals from their multitude of sources and to evaluate their potential and underlying mechanisms to alter cell growth have been ongoing for several years [ 4 ]. A subset of phytochemicals, isoflavones, are polyphenolic compounds that resemble estrogen in their structure and biological effects [ 5 ].…”

Dietary Intervention by Phytochemicals and Their Role in Modulating Coding and Non-Coding Genes in Cancer

“…Phytochemicals modulate coding and non-coding RNA gene expression leading to the restoration of the normal signal transduction pathways [ 37 , 38 , 39 ]. Phytochemical intervention in chemotherapy are sustained by a higher number of clinical trials that have shown that these compounds increase the treatment efficiency and decrease the side effects, inducing apoptosis in cancer cells, reducing drug resistance and also the severity of comorbid conditions.…”