Coronavirus disease (COVID‐19) caused by the novel coronavirus (SARS‐CoV‐2) has rapidly spread across the globe affecting 213 countries or territories with greater than six million confirmed cases and about 0.37 million deaths, with World Health Organization categorizing it as a pandemic. Infected patients present with fever, cough, shortness of breath, and critical cases show acute respiratory infection and multiple organ failure. Likelihood of these severe indications is further enhanced by age as well as underlying comorbidities such as diabetes, cardiovascular, or thoracic problems, as well as due to an immunocompromised state. Currently, curative drugs or vaccines are lacking, and the standard of care is limited to symptom management. Natural products like ginger, turmeric, garlic, onion, cinnamon, lemon, neem, basil, and black pepper have been scientifically proven to have therapeutic benefits against acute respiratory tract infections including pulmonary fibrosis, diffuse alveolar damage, pneumonia, and acute respiratory distress syndrome, as well as associated septic shock, lung and kidney injury, all of which are symptoms associated with COVID‐19 infection. This review highlights the potential of these natural products to serve as home‐based, inexpensive, easily accessible, prophylactic agents against COVID‐19.

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Luminescent carbon-based nanomaterials hold great promise due to their stable photo-physical behaviour, biocompatibility and lower toxicity. This work involves economic and facile one-pot green synthesis of water-soluble nanostructures from lemon grass (LGNS) [Cymbopogon citratus (DC) Stapf] as carbon source. High-resolution transmission electron microscopy confirmed the formation of LGNS with lattice spacing of 0.23 nm matching low-dimensional graphitic structures. The strong absorption exhibited at 278 nm could be attributed to л-states of sp 2 /sp 3 hybridisation in carbon nanostructures. Fluorescence spectroscopy of LGNS exhibited strong excitation-dependent emission properties over a broad range of wavelengths from 300 to 600 nm. Quantitatively, these LGNS were estimated to have quantum yield of 23.3%. Biomass derived LGNS could be potentially exploited for wide variety of applications like bioimaging, up-conversion, drug delivery and optoelectronic devices. To this extent, synthesised LGNS were used to image yeast cells via multicolour/multiexcitation fluorescence imaging.

Huntington's disease (HD) is a neurodegenerative disease associated with polyglutamine expansion in the protein Huntingtin. Though the polyglutamine repeat length correlates with the age of onset and severity, the complication points to disease modifiers. Mitochondrial dysfunction and metabolic deregulation are associated with the disease. Despite multi-omic characterization of patients and model systems, the mechanisms have remained elusive. Systems analysis of multi-omics data and its validation using yeast model could help to elucidate pathways that modulate protein aggregation. Metabolomic analysis of HD patients and yeast model of HD was carried out. Our analysis shows a considerable overlap of deregulated metabolic pathways. Further, our multi-omic analysis shows deregulated pathways that are common to human, mice and yeast model systems and those that are unique to them. The deregulated pathways include metabolism of various amino acids, glutathione metabolism, longevity, autophagy and mitophagy. Addition of selected metabolites and gene knockout from the deregulated pathways in yeast model system shows that they modulate protein aggregation. Taken together our results show modulation of deregulated pathways influences protein aggregation in HD with implications for progression and prognosis.