About this Research Topic

Background

Traditional medicine is the sum of the knowledge, skills, and practices based on the theories, beliefs, and experiences indigenous to different cultures, whether explicable or not, used in the maintenance of health as well as in the prevention, diagnosis, improvement, or treatment of physical and mental illness. To date, the majority of the population all around the world continues to rely on their own traditional medicine to treat diseases. However, lacking scientific guidance, empirical diagnosis, and less rigorous therapeutic strategy cannot provide greater benefit for the therapeutic effect and increase health care services. To overcome those issues, multi-omics experimental designs wish to discover pharmacological action or reveal insights into biological mechanisms at the molecular level by integrating with multiple omics like genome, transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, epigenome, and microbiome, shifting the “single omic” research paradigm.

Regional features, environmental transitions, and traditional culture have always affected the diagnostic theory and multicomponent therapeutic strategy. Despite the rich diversity of influence factors, the unclear material foundation, active ingredient, and the quality of medicinal materials are essentially an obstacle for the system thinking of traditional medicine. Moreover, the knowledge of bioactive principles and pharmacological action is currently very valuable to reveal the mechanism of action of traditional medicine once the patients or subjects give consent to medical treatment. In a word, the question of “how can traditional medicines treat diseases?” urgently needs be assessed critically in much more detail. There often are plenty of data and it is essential to critically these emerging ‘big data’.

Multi-omics is a powerful approach to elaborate the hereditary information of the organism and illustrate a wide range of biological phenomena. Multi-omics approach can be broadly classified into genetic, phenotypic, and environmental factors-based approaches, which will make a contribution to deeply excavate reliable genetic information of the organism from the correlation analysis of protein structure, pharmacodynamics substances, phenotype, and genome, which reveals the molecular basis of the formation of the quality of traditional medicines. Furthermore, this approach will identify the bioactive components, action targets, and biological pathways of various traditional medicine, and decipher the role of traditional medicine in a variety of diseases, including cardiovascular diseases, infectious diseases, metabolic diseases, and neurodegenerative diseases. Integrative analysis of multi-omics data helps to provide information about the biological processes by comparing the disease group to the normal group and giving an insight into the disease development.

In this Research Topic, we aim to collect high-quality research papers and review articles focusing on any traditional medical system of the world, which analyze the multi-omics data with traditional medicine, to give any genetic information about the traditional medicine, biological mechanisms, and the complex biological process in traditional therapies.
The following topics are welcome but not limited only to these:

• Method development for analyzing the multi-omics data to reveal the composition of traditional medicine materials.
• Omics-based strategies for treating diseases using traditional medicine.
• Methods and Applications for traditional medicine in precision medicine using multi-omics data and approaches
• Review and analysis of public repositories or databases of multi-omics data applied to traditional medicine.
• Multi-omics approaches for understanding the phytochemical basis and action mechanism of traditional drug compounds
• Multi-omics approaches in the study of the pharmacological effects of traditional medicines, for example, on the immune system and nervous system, etc.
• Multi-omics approaches in the safety of traditional medicine, especially its adverse reactions
• Breeding, identification, quality improvement, and biosynthesis of traditional medicine using the multi-omics method.

All the manuscripts submitted to the collection will need to fully comply with the Four Pillars of Best Practice in Ethnopharmacology (you can freely download the full version here).

Keywords: multi-omics, traditional medicine, genomic, transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, network pharmacology

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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