Quinacrine and Berberine as Antiviral Agents
against Dengue and Zika Fever: In Silico Approach by Vivek Srivastava in OpenAccess Biostatistics & Bioinformatics: Crimson Publishers- Open Access
Biostatistics & Bioinformatics journals
TDengue and Zika fever are mosquito-borne viral
diseases that have rapidly spread in all over world. Currently there are no
specific drugs for DENV and ZIKV infection. The recent outbreak of these
viruses realized that there are major health risks, demands an enhanced surveillance
and a need to develop novel drugs against them. Non-structural proteins NS5 and
NS3 are essential for the replication of the flavi-viral RNA genome. Therefore
its inhibition could be considered as a useful strategy for treatment of DENV
and ZIKV infection. Quinacrine and Berberine had been docked with
NS5-methyltransferase of Dengue virus and NS3 protein of ZIKV using Auto dock
4.2 tools. Quinacrine and Berberine showed binding affinity -6.83kcal/mol and
-6.22kcal/mol with NS5-methyltransferase and -7.32kcal/mol and -8.03kcal/mol
with NS3 protease of ZIKV, respectively. Observations discussion in review will
be useful in designing single drug against both virus infections.
On the Efficacy of Chinese Herbs for Survival
Rates of Breast Cancer Based on Taiwan’s National Health Insurance Research
Database (Nhird) by Kun Chan Lan in Open Access Biostatistics & Bioinformatics: Crimson Publishers- Bioinformatics Open Access Journals
Our research employs statistical analysis based on
a large national database to study the efficiency of Chinese herbs for
improving survival rates of breast cancer. People who used the four categoriesof herbal formula (安神之劑, 袪寒之劑, 袪痰之劑, 經產之劑) seem to
live longer in our database.
In the past decades, many advanced
bio-technologies have accelerated frontier research to explore biological
systems including cell, the basic unit of life. Experimental exploration of
cellular environment, however, will be difficult as it requires not only huge
labor efforts and costs but also large number of samples for reproducible
research. With large volume of available biological data generated,
bioinformatics becomes an important hybrid science subject to support
systematic and comprehensive data storage, processing and analysis. In joint
with statistics and algorithms, biological data such as DNA sequences have been
more efficiently processed by bioinformatics methods. Unlike sequential data,
biological structures are usually more dynamic and stochastic, thus, structural
biology is more challenging a task for bioinformatics.
