Anticancer drugs discovery and development from marine organism.

The chemical and biological diversity of the different marine evolutionary group is endless and therefore, this is an amazing resource for the discovery of new anticancer drugs. Comprising 34 of the 36 Phyla of life, marine ecosystems are indeed our last genetic diversity and biotechnological boundary; terrestrial systems possess only 17 Phyla. Sponges, coelenterates and microorganisms are the foremost resources of therapeutic compounds. Algae, echinoderms, tunicates, mollusks, bryozoans are also the sources of anticancer drugs from marine resources. We highlight the past and current status of marine anticancer pharmacology using different marine groups.

Recent advances of fluorescent technologies for drug discovery and development.

Recent progresses in the development of fluorescent technologies become a reliable device for drug discovery research. The fluorescence tools offer attractive options for an opportunity to visualize the effects of drug candidates in the cells. The fluorescent tools, such as fluorescent protein, are regularly used in a range of drug discovery processes. A better understanding and use of fluorescent technologies facilitate drug discovery research faster and can open up new applications. Therefore, we have provided information about some new generation fluorescent reagents (GFP and fluorophores). This review illustrates how fluorescent technologies and fluorescent tools are contributing to the drug discovery process mainly high-throughput screening (HTS), disease mechanism based target discovery, disease-genes-based target discovery, 'target classes' based target candidate discovery, physiology-based drug discovery, genomics-based drug discovery, target validation and their future perspectives.

Zebrafish: a complete animal model for in vivo drug discovery and development.

In last few years, the use of zebrafish (Danio rerio) in scientific research is growing very rapidly. Initially, it was a popular as a model of vertebrate development because zebrafish embryos are transparent and also develop rapidly. Presently, the research using zebrafish is expanding into other areas such as pharmacology, clinical research as a diseases model and interestingly in drug discovery. The use of zebrafish in pharmaceutical research and discovery and drug development is mainly screening of lead compounds, target identification, target validation, morpholino oligonucleotide screens, assay development for drug discovery, physiology based drug discovery, quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) and structure -activity relationships (SAR) study and drug toxicity study. In this paper, we have described properly all the areas of drug discovery where zebrafish is used as a tool. We are hopeful that the use of these techniques or methods will make the zebrafish a prominent model in drug discovery and development research in the forthcoming years.