Application of metabolomics in toxicity evaluation of traditional Chinese medicines.

Traditional Chinese medicines (TCM) have a long history of use because of its potential complementary therapy and fewer adverse effects. However, the toxicity and safety issues of TCM have drawn considerable attention in the past two decades. Metabolomics is an "omics" approach that aims to comprehensively analyze all metabolites in biological samples. In agreement with the holistic concept of TCM, metabolomics has shown great potential in efficacy and toxicity evaluation of TCM. Recently, a large amount of metabolomic researches have been devoted to exploring the mechanism of toxicity induced by TCM, such as hepatotoxicity, nephrotoxicity, and cardiotoxicity. In this paper, the application of metabolomics in toxicity evaluation of bioactive compounds, TCM extracts and TCM prescriptions are reviewed, and the potential problems and further perspectives for application of metabolomics in toxicological studies are also discussed.

Fabrication of a Flexible Gold Nanorod Polymer Metafilm via a Phase Transfer Method as a SERS Substrate for Detecting Food Contaminants.

Surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) has been widely used in detection of food safety due to the nondestructive examination property. Here, we reported a flexible SERS film based on a polymer-immobilized gold nanorod polymer metafilm. Polystyrene-polyisoprene-polystyrene (SIS), a transparent and flexible, along with having excellent elasticity, polymer, was chosen as the main support of gold nanorods. A simple phase transfer progress was adopted to mix the gold nanorods with the polymer, which can further be used in most water-insoluble polymers. The SERS film performed satisfactorily while being tested in a series of standard Raman probes, like crystal violet (CV) and malachite green (MG). Moreover, the excellent reproducibility and elastic properties make the film a promising substrate in practical detection. Hence, the MG detection on the fish surface and trace thiram detection on orange pericarp were inspected with detection results of 1 × 10-10 and 1 × 10-6 M, which were below the demand of the National standard of China, exactly matching the realistic application requirements.

Rapid fabrication of flexible and transparent gold nanorods/poly (methyl methacrylate) membrane substrate for SERS nanosensor application.

Flexible substrates have been proposed for daily-life applications in SERS detection due to the prominent sample collection properties such as they can be wrapped around non-planar object surface. Combining the noble metals with polymers, flexible SERS substrates could be fabricated with advantages of light weight, transparency and high SERS sensitivity. Herein, we prepare a gold nanorods (AuNRs)/poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) film as flexible SERS substrate by self-assembling a uniformly AuNRs array layer on PMMA template. This AuNRs/PMMA film performs excellently on thiram trace detection with the lowest detection concentration of 0.5 ppb. The fabricated substrates were applied for practical detection with cucumber by directly covering the AuNRs/PMMA flexible film on the target surface. Furthermore, the high SERS sensitivity as well as great reproducibility present a wide range of prospections for the further application of non-plane surface.