Plant Secondary Metabolites Produced in Response to Abiotic Stresses Has Potential Application in Pharmaceutical Product Development

Plant secondary metabolites (PSMs) are vital for human health and constitute the skeletal framework of many pharmaceutical drugs. Indeed, more than 25% of the existing drugs belong to PSMs. One of the continuing challenges for drug discovery and pharmaceutical industries is gaining access to natural products, including medicinal plants. This bottleneck is heightened for endangered species prohibited for large sample collection, even if they show biological hits. While cultivating the pharmaceutically interesting plant species may be a solution, it is not always possible to grow the organism outside its natural habitat. Plants affected by abiotic stress present a potential alternative source for drug discovery. In order to overcome abiotic environmental stressors, plants may mount a defense response by producing a diversity of PSMs to avoid cells and tissue damage. Plants either synthesize new chemicals or increase the concentration (in most instances) of existing chemicals, including the prominent bioactive lead compounds morphine, camptothecin, catharanthine, epicatechin-3-gallate (EGCG), quercetin, resveratrol, and kaempferol. Most PSMs produced under various abiotic stress conditions are plant defense chemicals and are functionally anti-inflammatory and antioxidative. The major PSM groups are terpenoids, followed by alkaloids and phenolic compounds. We have searched the literature on plants affected by abiotic stress (primarily studied in the simulated growth conditions) and their PSMs (including pharmacological activities) from PubMed, Scopus, MEDLINE Ovid, Google Scholar, Databases, and journal websites. We used search keywords: “stress-affected plants,” “plant secondary metabolites, “abiotic stress,” “climatic influence,” “pharmacological activities,” “bioactive compounds,” “drug discovery,” and “medicinal plants” and retrieved published literature between 1973 to 2021. This review provides an overview of variation in bioactive phytochemical production in plants under various abiotic stress and their potential in the biodiscovery of therapeutic drugs. We excluded studies on the effects of biotic stress on PSMs.     

On the concept of discrete convergence

F. Stummel's notion of discrete approximation and one of its possible concretizations are used. The concepts of consistency, closedness, stability (BR-stability) and regularity (B-regularity) of the sequences of operators at some point v are considered. The behavior of the sequences of the solutions of approximating equations (sequences of o-solutions) is studied.     

Method for computing the anisotropy of the solid-liquid interfacial free energy.

We present a method to compute accurately the weak anisotropy of the solid-liquid interfacial free energy, a parameter which influences dendritic evolution in materials with atomically rough interfaces. The method is based on monitoring interfacial fluctuations during molecular dynamics simulation and extracting the interfacial stiffness which is an order of magnitude more anisotropic than the interfacial free energy. We present results for pure Ni with interatomic potentials derived from the embedded atom method.     

A Gauss-Kusmin theorem for optimal continued fractions

A Gauss-Kusmin theorem for the Optimal Continued Fraction (OCF) expansion is obtained. In order to do so, first a Gauss-Kusmin theorem is derived for the natural extension of the ergodic system underlying Hurwitz's Singular Continued Fraction (SCF) (and similarly for the continued fraction to the nearer integer (NICF)). Since the NICF, SCF and OCF are all examples of maximal -expansions, it follows from a result of Kraaikamp that the SCF and OCF are metrically isomorphic. This isomorphism is then used to carry over the results for the SCF to any other maximal -expansion, in particular to the OCF. Along the way, a Heilbronn-theorem is obtained for any maximal -expansion.