Natural products and functional foods, including polyphenols, polysaccharides, dietary fiber, and polyunsaturated fatty acids, etc., are commonly used as alternative and complementary medical treatments for preventing the pathogenesis and progress of many diseases such as, but not limited to metabolic diseases, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and cataracts. Although recent advances in the fields of alternative and complementary medicine in disease treatment are on the rise, more profound studies are still needed to understand better the alternative and complementary medical effects of natural products and nutritional therapy and their contribution to human health.

Omics technologies including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics have been significant players in biomedical applications for the last 30 years. They have greatly accelerated the progress of system biology, characterized by providing a comprehensive picture of a particular type of biomolecule (RNA, proteins, metabolites, etc.) in biological systems. In particular, many recent studies have integrated multi-omics strategies to obtain a broader view and more reliable description of biological processes, making it possible to explore the interactions between different layers of omics and complex phenotypes. As such, omics techniques are expected to or have already contributed to the breakthrough of the bottleneck in alternative and complementary medicine.

"Recent advances in omics technologies in alternative and complementary medicine: Focus on natural products and nutritional therapy" will provide a forum for publishing and discussing new developments and trends in the field. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

- Application of omics in biological interpretation and pathway analysis of natural products and nutritional therapy in alternative and complementary medicine.

- Novel statistical and computational methods to analyze omics data and applications to natural products and nutritional therapy.

- Focus on new bioinformatics tools for omics data integration in natural products and nutritional therapy.

- Applications of omics in population studies related to natural products and nutritional therapy, including but not limited to clinical research.

Please Note: For manuscripts addressing multiherbal preparations or formulas in traditional medicine, the study material must be described in sufficient detail, including botanical and chemical composition. The high-activity extracts must be well characterized using chemical approaches, such as HPLC and HPLC-MS. The chemical characterization should be based on highly purified compounds.

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Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences

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