Olalekan Onisuru

The characterization of root vegetables’ bioactive proteins biophysically and biochemically becomes imperative as they play an incredibly important role in the discovery, development, and formulation of bioactive proteins as biopharmaceutical products. This is because bioactive proteins differ in terms of size, molecular weights, structures, and physicochemical properties. Biophysical and biochemical characterization employs several techniques ranging from simple to complex procedures to give insight into proteins’ high-order structures, functions, and biochemical activities. Owing to the increasing awareness and acceptance of the use of peptides and proteins of root vegetable origin as treatment agents against some debilitatingly chronic diseases, researchers are now exploring an eco-innovative approach to reduce their loss by getting to structurally and functionally characterizing them. Several biophysical and biochemical tools are employed routinely for protein characterization and some of which are ultraviolet-visual (UV-Vis) spectroscopy, high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), circular dichroism (CD), intrinsic tryptophan fluorescence (ITF), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), thermal shift assay (TSA), among others.

Lassa fever (LF) is a rodent-borne disease that threatens human health in the sub-region of West Africa where the zoonotic host of Lassa virus (LASV) is predominant. Currently, treatment options for LF are limited and since no preventive vaccine is approved for its infectivity, there is a high mortality rate in endemic areas. This narrative review explores the transmission, pathogenicity of LASV, advances, and challenges of different treatment options. Our findings indicate that genetic diversity among the different strains of LASV and their ability to circumvent the immune system poses a critical challenge to the development of LASV vaccines/therapeutics. Thus, understanding the biochemistry, physiology and genetic polymorphism of LASV, mechanism of evading host immunity are essential for development of effective LASV vaccines/therapeutics to combat this lethal viral disease. The LASV nucleoprotein (NP) is a novel target for therapeutics as it functions significantly in several aspects of the viral life cycle. Consequently, LASV NP inhibitors could be employed as effective therapeutics as they will potentially inhibit LASV replication. Effective preventive control measures, vaccine development, target validation, and repurposing of existing drugs, such as ribavirin, using activity or in silico-based and computational bioinformatics, would aid in the development of novel drugs for LF management.