Abstract
The development of new drugs is multidisciplinary and systematic work. High-throughput techniques based on “-omics” have driven the discovery of biomarkers in diseases and therapeutic targets of drugs. A transcriptome is the complete set of all RNAs transcribed by certain tissues or cells at a specific stage of development or physiological condition. Transcriptome research can demonstrate gene functions and structures from the whole level and reveal the molecular mechanism of specific biological processes in diseases. Currently, gene expression microarray and high-throughput RNA-sequencing have been widely used in biological, medical, clinical, and drug research. The former has been applied in drug screening and biomarker detection of drugs due to its high throughput, fast detection speed, simple analysis, and relatively low price. With the further development of detection technology and the improvement of analytical methods, the detection flux of RNA-seq is much higher but the price is lower, hence it has powerful advantages in detecting biomarkers and drug discovery. Compared with the traditional RNA-seq, scRNA-seq has higher accuracy and efficiency, especially the single-cell level of gene expression pattern analysis can provide more information for drug and biomarker discovery. Therefore, (sc)RNA-seq has broader application prospects, especially in the field of drug discovery. In this overview, we will review the application of these technologies in drug, especially in natural drug and biomarker discovery and development. Emerging applications of scRNA-seq and the third generation RNA-sequencing tools are also discussed.
Highlights
The research on lead compounds with novel structures, significant activities and clear mechanisms require multidisciplinary and systematic collaboration
This study reveals that Caffeic acid phenethyl ester (CAPE) may be used as a potential therapeutic compound for nasopharyngeal carcinoma therapy
There is a growing momentum of using sequencing platforms for transcriptome sequencing, microarrays are more popular in the case of large sample size, especially in clinical research and drug development, due to their high detection speed, simple and quick data processing, and relative low cost
Summary
The research on lead compounds with novel structures, significant activities and clear mechanisms require multidisciplinary and systematic collaboration. This study reveals that CAPE may be used as a potential therapeutic compound for nasopharyngeal carcinoma therapy It can be seen from the above cases that gene expression microarray technology has made great progress in screening of active drugs, elucidating the composition of natural drugs, the identification of therapeutic targets and pathways, the optimization of formulae, and providing a theoretical basis for the utilizes of natural medicines. They found nicotinamide (NAM) can improve the disease-related phenotypes by inhibiting drusen protein, inflammation and complement factors, up-regulated nucleosome, ribosome, and chromatin-modifying genes through RNA-seq technology Based on these findings, they suggested that NAM could be an effective drug in developing treatments for AMD (Saini et al, 2017). Marion et al applied single cell technologies, Drop-based scRNAseq, to check cellular heterogeneity contributes
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