Ethnobotanical study and phytochemical profiling of Heptapleurum hypoleucum leaf extract and evaluation of its antimicrobial activities against diarrhea-causing bacteria.

BACKGROUND: Due to the development of superbugs as a result of unprescribed and frequent use of antibiotics in recent years, an alternate form of medicine had to be introduced. In light of this global threat, researchers all over the world have been gravitating towards herbal medicines. In order to find out new ways of saving the planet using medicinal plants, ethnobotanical studies must be carried out. Concerning this, an ethnobotanical study has been done in this paper to identify potential medicinal plants in Rangamati, Bangladesh. RESULTS: For the ethnobotanical survey, randomized 104 people were interviewed and 62 different plant species were found to treat 19 different kinds of diseases and 84% of people reported to be completely recovered. Furthermore, among the 19 diseases found, the majority of them were common cold, abdominal pain or gastric, diarrhea, and dysentery. From the 62 different plant species, Heptapleurum hypoleucum, used for the treatment of diarrhea, was selected for conducting further studies due to its heavy use as reported by the tribal people. In this study, the aqueous, ethanol, and methanol extracts of Heptapleurum hypoleucum were subjected to microbial susceptibility assays using the agar well diffusion method. The test microorganisms were Salmonella typhi, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Staphylococcus aureus, Shigella flexneri, and Escherichia coli. Among these, the most susceptible organisms were Staphylococcus aureus (21 mm) and Salmonella typhi (19 mm) in the ethanolic extract. Also, the methanolic extract showed an inhibition zone of 13 mm against E. coli, which was more than that of the antibiotic's (11 mm). Phytochemical screening of the plant revealed that it contains alkaloids, phenols, steroids, and flavonoids, but lacks saponins and tannins. CONCLUSION: To combat the rising threat of antibiotic resistance, ethnoscience needs to be consolidated with modern biotechnological techniques to make the most use of the vast amount of natural resources. The findings of this study indicate that Heptapleurum hypoleucum, an ethnobotanical medicinal plant, has shown comparable antimicrobial activity with commercial antibiotics against several diarrhea-causing pathogens and also contains several medically important phytochemicals.

An Immunopharmacoinformatics Approach in Development of Vaccine and Drug Candidates for West Nile Virus.

An outbreak of West Nile Virus (WNV) like the recent Ebola can be more epidemic and fatal to public health throughout the world. WNV possesses utmost threat as no vaccine or drug is currently available for its treatment except mosquito control. The current study applied the combined approach of immunoinformatics and pharmacoinformatics to design potential epitope-based vaccines and drug candidates against WNV. By analyzing the whole proteome of 2994 proteins, the WNV envelope glycoprotein was selected as a therapeutic target based on its highest antigenicity. After proper assessment "KSFLVHREW" and "ITPSAPSYT" were found to be the most potential T and B-cell epitopes, respectively. Besides, we have designed and validated four novel drugs from a known WNV inhibitor, AP30451 by adopting computational approaches. Toxicity assessment and drug score confirmed the effectiveness of these drug candidates. This in silico research might greatly facilitate the wet lab experiments to develop vaccine and drug against WNV.

Treating Diabetes Mellitus: Pharmacophore Based Designing of Potential Drugs from Gymnema sylvestre against Insulin Receptor Protein.

Diabetes mellitus (DM) is one of the most prevalent metabolic disorders which can affect the quality of life severely. Injectable insulin is currently being used to treat DM which is mainly associated with patient inconvenience. Small molecules that can act as insulin receptor (IR) agonist would be better alternatives to insulin injection. Herein, ten bioactive small compounds derived from Gymnema sylvestre (G. sylvestre) were chosen to determine their IR binding affinity and ADMET properties using a combined approach of molecular docking study and computational pharmacokinetic elucidation. Designing structural analogues were also performed for the compounds associated with toxicity and less IR affinity. Among the ten parent compounds, six were found to have significant pharmacokinetic properties with considerable binding affinity towards IR while four compounds were associated with toxicity and less IR affinity. Among the forty structural analogues, four compounds demonstrated considerably increased binding affinity towards IR and less toxicity compared with parent compounds. Finally, molecular interaction analysis revealed that six parent compounds and four analogues interact with the active site amino acids of IR. So this study would be a way to identify new therapeutics and alternatives to insulin for diabetic patients.

Epitope-based peptide vaccine design and target site depiction against Ebola viruses: an immunoinformatics study.

Ebola viruses (EBOVs) have been identified as an emerging threat in recent year as it causes severe haemorrhagic fever in human. Epitope-based vaccine design for EBOVs remains a top priority because a mere progress has been made in this regard. Another reason is the lack of antiviral drug and licensed vaccine although there is a severe outbreak in Central Africa. In this study, we aimed to design an epitope-based vaccine that can trigger a significant immune response as well as to prognosticate inhibitor that can bind with potential drug target sites using various immunoinformatics and docking simulation tools. The capacity to induce both humoral and cell-mediated immunity by T cell and B cell was checked for the selected protein. The peptide region spanning 9 amino acids from 42 to 50 and the sequence TLASIGTAF were found as the most potential B and T cell epitopes, respectively. This peptide could interact with 12 HLAs and showed high population coverage up to 80.99%. Using molecular docking, the epitope was further appraised for binding against HLA molecules to verify the binding cleft interaction. In addition with this, the allergenicity of the epitopes was also evaluated. In the post-therapeutic strategy, docking study of predicted 3D structure identified suitable therapeutic inhibitor against targeted protein. However, this computational epitope-based peptide vaccine designing and target site prediction against EBOVs open up a new horizon which may be the prospective way in Ebola viruses research; the results require validation by in vitro and in vivo experiments.