Advancing botanical safety: A strategy for selecting, sourcing, and characterizing botanicals for developing toxicological tools.

Increases in botanical use, encompassing herbal medicines and dietary supplements, have underlined a critical need for an advancement in safety assessment methodologies. However, botanicals present unique challenges for safety assessment due to their complex and variable composition arising from diverse growing conditions, processing methods, and plant varieties. Historically, botanicals have been largely evaluated based on their history of use information, based primarily on traditional use or dietary history.

Do Storage Conditions Affect Collected Cookstove Emission Samples? Implications for Field Studies.

Cookstove emissions are a significant source of indoor air pollution in developing countries and rural communities world-wide. Considering that many research sites for evaluating cookstove emissions and interventions are remote and require potentially lengthy periods of particulate matter (PM) filter sample storage in sub-optimal conditions (e.g.

A cross-sectional clinical study in women to investigate possible genotoxicity and hematological abnormalities related to the use of black cohosh botanical dietary supplements.

Black cohosh (BC; Actaea racemosa L.), a top-selling botanical dietary supplement, is marketed to women primarily to ameliorate a variety of gynecological symptoms. Due to widespread usage, limited safety information, and sporadic reports of hepatotoxicity, the Division of the National Toxicology Program (DNTP) initially evaluated BC extract in female rats and mice.

Working with the natural complexity: Selection and characterization of black cohosh root extract for use in toxicology testing.

Black cohosh (Actaea racemosa L.) is a botanical supplement marketed to women of all ages. Due to paucity of data to assess the safe use, the National Toxicology Program (NTP) is evaluating the toxicity of black cohosh.

A strategy for test article selection and phytochemical characterization of Echinacea purpurea extract for safety testing.

Botanical dietary supplements (BDS) are used around the world for many purported therapeutic properties. The selection of an authentic product and it's phytochemical characterization is critical to generate robust safety data. Because botanicals are complex mixtures with variable quality, identification of a representative product for testing has been challenging.

Evaluating Sufficient Similarity of Botanical Dietary Supplements: Combining Chemical and In Vitro Biological Data.

Botanical dietary supplements are complex mixtures with numerous potential sources of variation along the supply chain from raw plant material to the market. Approaches for determining sufficient similarity (ie, complex mixture read-across) may be required to extrapolate efficacy or safety data from a tested sample to other products containing the botanical ingredient(s) of interest. In this work, screening-level approaches for generating both chemical and biological-response profiles were used to evaluate the similarity of black cohosh (Actaea racemosa) and Echinacea purpurea samples to well-characterized National Toxicology Program (NTP) test articles.

Characterization of aqueous formulations of tetra- and pentavalent forms of vanadium in support of test article selection in toxicology studies.

Tetravalent (V) and pentavalent (V) forms of vanadium were selected for testing by the National Toxicology Program via drinking water exposure due to potential human exposure. To aid in the test article selection, drinking water formulations (125-2000 mg/L) of vanadyl sulfate (V), sodium orthovanadate, and sodium metavanadate (V) were characterized by ultraviolet/visible (UV/VIS) spectroscopy, mass spectrometry (MS), or V nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Aqueous formulations of orthovanadate, metavanadate, and vanadyl sulfate in general were basic, neutral, and acidic, respectively.