Jing Chen

The properties and meridian affinities of Chinese herbal medicine are closely associated with their therapeutic efficacy. This review focuses on approved antitumour Chinese medicines listed in the Pharmacopoeia of the People's Republic of China (2020 Edition, Volume I), highlighting their key components. Statistical methods were used to analyse the properties, flavours and channel tropisms of antitumour traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), including both proprietary formulations and commercially available individual herbs. Distinctive patterns were identified by comparing herb profiles with contemporary experimental studies on antitumour TCM. Analysis revealed that bitter-cold herbs represented the highest proportion of antitumour TCM, with most showing tropism towards the liver channel. These findings provide a reference framework for antitumour drug development, indicating that bitter-cold herbs merit priority as candidate ingredients.

Sustainable agriculture highly relies on pollinators which affect the production and diversity of around 75% of foodcrops worldwide. However, the population and fitness of pollinators are showing sharp declining trends for years. Exposure to insecticides especially during crop pollination together with lacking effective management method has been reported as a dominant factor. Here, we have developed versatile and potent insecticide scavengers based on locust cell membrane and tannic acid (TA)-coated mesoporous silicon microparticles (MTSM) to prevent pollinators from a broad-spectrum insecticides including organophosphorus, pyrethroids, and neonicotinoids. Leveraging the π-π stacking with TA and specific binding by the acetylcholinesterases, nicotine receptors of acetylcholine, or voltage-gated sodium channels on locust cell membrane, MTSM presented enormously high removal efficiency of various insecticides while minimum nonspecific clearance of favorable enzymes mainly exsisting in gastrointestinal system of bees. Notably, MTSM exhibited over 12 h residency in gastrointestinal tract of bumblebees to facilitate insecticide scanvenging, and could be almost entirly excreted from bees within 48 h, causing no death of bees even at a high concentration of 50 mg/mL. In microcolonies of bumblebee fed with insecticide-contaminated impatien pollen patties, MTSM revealed dose-dependent detoxicification capacity towards organophosphorus and neonicotinoids insecticides. In sharp constrast to complete death of bumblebees fed with triazophos at a dose of 98 ng/bee within 5 days, the survival rate of bumblebees was significantly elevated to 75% and 90% by MTSM at doses of 1.0 and 20 mg/mL within 10 days, respectively. Overall, MTSM combining the merits of good safety, facile construction, and efficient and broad-spectrum detoxification presents versatile and potent scavengers to protect managed pollinators from multiclass insecticides.