Forum:Ever Wonder What Is In Traditional Chinese Medicine?

Question

[Zev.Kronenberg]

Deep Sequencing of Plant and Animal DNA Contained within Traditional Chinese Medicines Reveals Legality Issues and Health Safety Concerns

I found this article to be very interesting. There are a lot of caveats, but it is a cool use of high throughput sequencing.

[Istvan Albert]

fixed the link, it seems the colon : character used inside the link leads to anther url parsing bug https://github.com/ialbert/biostar-central/issues/97

Answer 1

[Giovanni M Dall'Olio]

A few months ago Nature published a special issue on Traditional Chinese Medicine. Here is the link: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v480/n7378_supp/full/480S82a.html

In that issue, Traditional Chinese medicine was compared to systems biology, in the sense that they have a similar approach. While traditional biology focuses on studying single processes and then scales toward higher complexity, systems biology starts by observing the whole system from above and tries to reconstruct the rules that define it; similarly, while modern medicine focuses on a single symptom (e.g. headhache, cancer, etc..), Traditional Chinese Medicine observes the whole system and tries to get a cure for the whole.

I have no clue of the effectiveness of Traditional Chinese Medicine and I never tried it, but I think that the comparison is interesting. There it may be things that the modern medicine can learn from olter cultures.

Answer 2

[Istvan Albert]

This is such an awesome application of sequencing.

For what is worth I am convinced that genomic sequencing will lead to breakthroughs in domains we havent even thought of.