oa Editorial [Special Board Members Issue]

This is the second issue of ‘Drug Metabolism Letters’ reporting recent research in a variety of areas of drug metabolism contribted by the Editorial Board Members of the journal. The journal, publishing its third volume, has recently been accepted by PubMed for coverage!! Another milestone development is the launch of a new online manuscript submission and processing system, Contents Management System (CMS; http://bentham-editorial.org). I am sure you will find papers in this issue quite interesting to read: Yamazaki et al. in ‘Effects of histidine-tag ----systems’ have concluded that histidine-tagged system would be non-applicable for P450 3A5 function. Paper by Al-Kadi et al. discusses Peganum harmala L. (Zygophyllaceae), which a common plant in Middle East and it is still used traditionally to treat several diseases. The effect of P. harmala extract on the expression of different cytochrome P450's (CYP) involved in drug metabolism was examined in human HepG2 cells. In the paper by Liu et al. zebrafish has been modeled for investigating the drug metabolism through sulfation by establishing a complete repertoire of the zebrafish Phase II cytosolic sulfotransferases (SULTs). A reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) analysis revealed developmental stage-dependent expression of SULT3 ST3 during embryonic development and throughout the larval stage onto maturity. ‘Cloning, expression, ------ (Macaca fascicularis)’ authored by Yamazaki et al. suggests that cynomolgus macaques that are frequently used in drug metabolism studies due to their evolutionary closeness to humans, have not been fully explored for the presence of genes encoding drug-metabolizing enzymes The results indicate that cynomolgus CYP3A43 is expressed in liver and encodes a functional drug-metabolizing enzyme and could play a role in hepatic drug metabolism. Paper by Aiming Yu et al. describes desipramine (DMI), a CYP2D6 probe, which was used as a model drug to test whether CYP2D6-humanized (Tg-CYP2D6) and wild-type control mice could be used as preclinical animal models to identify the effects of CYP2D6 genotype/phenotype on drug metabolic profiles. Author identified three metabolites, 2-hydroxyl-, 10-hydroxyl, and N-desmethyl-desipramine. According to Zhou et al. the nuclear receptor (NR) superfamily represents an important group of regulating factors that control the expression of a number of target genes including those encoding important drug metabolizing enzymes and drug transporters. Their results indicate that both SIFT and PolyPhen are useful and efficient tools to predict the functional effects of nsSNPs of human NR genes....