Medicine and Food Homology (MFH) refers to edible herbal materials that can be employed both as food and medicine. As the critical intersection of food and medicine, MFH materials are rich in nutrition that can maintain people’s health and even prevent or cure diseases. With a long-standing history around the world, MFH remains popular as it conforms to nature and health-seeking dietary choices today. Instead of consuming them in the form of raw material, the future direction of MFH research is to precisely isolate these bioactive factors and apply them in a rational/value-added way, making them into more widely accepted functional foods and therapeutic drugs. Therefore, advanced separation and analytical methods of these bioactive factors would be greatly helpful for sparking innovative ideas for MFH materials processing.

The MFH material is a rather sophisticated bio-mixture, containing a large array of phytochemicals. However, the functional value of the MFH materials is highly influenced by many factors, such as species, origin, as well as harvesting, storage, and processing conditions. The issue of how to identify the adulteration of low-cost chemicals with MFH materials is also an important challenge. Therefore, as the key to solving these problems, there is an urgent need for effective tools and methods to address the precise isolation, identification, authentication, and elucidation of bioactive factors in MFH materials.

The aim of this Research Topic is to attract original research articles and review articles focusing on introducing and applying emerging tools and methodologies capable of dealing with the separation, identification, authentication, and elucidation of bioactive factors in MFH materials and products, in a cost-efficient way. We especially encourage studies on the fast screening and elucidation of components unambiguously responsible for anticancer, antifungal, antidementia, antioxidant, antimicrobial, anti-viral, anti-obesity, enzyme inhibition, immune stimulating, adaptogenic, hypoglycemic, and prebiotics activities. We also welcome submissions about the development of innovative platforms compatible with state-of-the-art detectors (biosensors, Raman, mass spectrometry, and NMR) for quality control of MFH.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following (related to bioactive factors in Medicine and Food Homology materials):

· Novel and cost-efficient extraction/isolation procedure design;

· Highly integrated analytical platform/tool with multi-detectors;

· Nontargeted and effect-directed assay;

· Pattern recognition and chemometrics analysis;

· Network pharmacology and omics evaluation;

· Spectrum-effect relationship elucidation;

· Adulteration identification.

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Frontiers in Nutrition

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