To elucidate the molecular mechanism of how natural products/herbal medicines influence genomic processes by altering epigenetic markers and chromatin structure.

The eukaryotic genome is packaged into a nucleoprotein structure known as chromatin. Therefore, the molecular machinery that mediates transcription, DNA replication, DNA repair and recombination all have to be able to negotiate this chromatin structure in order to access the DNA sequence. Indeed, many recent studies indicate that chromatin is a highly dynamic structure that plays an essential role in the regulation of all these activities. Thus, a basic understanding of the mechanisms by which chromatin structure is assembled and modified is fundamental questions in biology. Herbal medicine is a system of alternative medicine therapies that have been developed empirically over the past 2100 years and remains popular in some Far East Asian populations. There are varieties of herbal medicines available and their pleiotropic effects have been used in diverse clinical applications, however, their mechanism of action is still poorly understood. It has been shown that 29.8% of herbal medicines contain compounds that directly or indirectly interact with the chromatin related proteins suggesting that they have a potential role in the regulation of genomic processes by altering the chromatin structure. My first goal therefore is to elucidating the molecular mechanism of how herbal medicines influence genomic processes such as DNA repair, transcription, and replication by altering the chromatin structure/epigenetic markers in yeast. Next, guided by the insight provided by my proposed yeast studies, I will delineate the molecular mechanism of how herbal medicines influence chromatin structure /epigenetic markers in mammalian cells. Hopefully, by reveal the mechanisms; we could facilitate the discovery of new drugs for human diseases.

Project ID:PA10111-0028
External Project ID:NSC101-2311-B182-004