This issue proposes a dense menu, with contributions on health, agriculture, environment and big data – four domains that are typically in the front of the scientific, but also economical and societal, scenes.
Reyes-Munguia et al. address the interaction of some medicinal plant extracts with the immune system as well as their antioxidant and antimicrobial activities. Natural compounds, which have been used since time immemorial for their impact on human health, are intensively studied as we need to understand their mechanisms of action and figure out their huge diversity. In this review, the authors list some of the main active substances found in plants and discuss the various methods to assess their potential effects on our body.
Cold stress is a plague for the growth and development of crop plants, especially in a time where global warming triggers a trend towards the earlier onset of springtime germination, correlating with an increase in risk for late season frost and cold stress events. Mutlu et al. investigate the effect of salicylic acid (SA) treatment on two common barley cultivars, demonstrating that exogenous and endogenous SA could play an ameliorating role on cold tolerance by regulating the oxidation level in both cold-sensitive and cold-tolerant cultivars.
Bioindicators (plants, planktons and microbes) provide important means for detecting changes in the environment. In their review paper, Parmar et al. discuss the various types of bioindicators and the way they react to their surroundings, thus showing the impact of external factors (such as chemical or biological pollution) on an ecosystem.
Since life science has entered the ‘omics’ era, biologists are facing an explosion in the amount of data. This is especially the case for genomics, with next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies providing more and more data to analyse, share and archive. In their comprehensive paper, Tripathi et al. review the current state of knowledge of big data algorithms for NGS to reveal hidden patterns in sequencing, analysis and annotation.
We hope our readers will enjoy these various contributions, which altogether testify to the complexity of our environment and the technological and scientifical effort scientists are expending to decipher its properties and act on it.