Advances in the role of natural products in human gene expression

Natural products (NPs), especially those from traditional herbal medicines, can evidently modulate human gene expression at multiple levels, leading to a wide diversity of bioactivities. However, although we have found numerous bio-functions of NPs for human body, we still relatively know little about how NPs achieve it due to the reason that compared with the bioactivity, the definite way of NPs regulating gene expression has attracted much less attention. Interestingly, with rapidly advancing knowledge of mechanisms for gene regulation in recent years, it is found that newly-understood mechanisms, such as the post-transcriptional regulation, are also involved in the NP-elicited bio-effects, providing a new perspective on understanding the role of NPs in gene expression. Therefore, in this review we summarize the function of NPs in gene expression on the perspective view of transcriptional, post-transcriptional, and post-translational regulation to reinforce the understand of NP-induced effects in gene expression and facilitate the exploration of more potential therapeutic effects of NPs.