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Historically, leishmaniasis has been dated back over 2500 BCE, and numerous primeval accounts of disease present in both earliest literatures and current molecular discoveries from archaeologic resources. Being such a complex, neglected disease, leishmaniasis has a profound effect on community health of the world and is regarded among the six important tropical diseases by World Health Organization. Epidemiologically, leishmaniasis is a non-transmissible, vector-borne disease with broad morbidity and mortality in over 90 tropical and subtropical geographic regions. Evolution of leishmaniasis is intrinsically coupled with human activity hence, key historical progression events between Leishmania, and its linked host reservoirs will be discussed in accord with geographic evolution of Earth’s terrain including evidences from fossils and various hypotheses. Comprehension of evolutionary relationships between sandflies and Leishmania are critical for future forecast of its transmission outlines, epidemiological determination, and for intervening, governing approaches and prospects for managing leishmaniasis.

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 Elsevier B.V. Cancer is one of the fast-growing diseases with an increasing trend in mortality rate worldwide. Among the treatment modalities, chemotherapy is regarded as an active therapeutic approach where anti-cancer drugs are used to kill cancer cells or arrest its growth. With the emergence of nanotechnology, nanomedicines are being developed to improve the overall pharmaceutical properties of anti-cancer drugs namely drug stability, solubility and bioavailability. Lignin-based nanomaterials are prepared from naturally available lignin polymers, a constituent of lignocellulosic biomass, showcases non-toxic behavior, biodegradable nature, and excellent absorption capacity and are well suited for biomedical applications. This review presents the recent advances on the emerging applications of lignin-based nanomaterials for cancer therapeutics. More importantly, the functional properties of lignin -nanoparticulate systems in cancer drug delivery was discussed.

Microorganisms are omnipresent and exhibit vast biodiversity and metabolic versatility. Such attributes allow microorganisms to flourish and pervade even in extreme environmental conditions. As observed, majority of microbes present in diverse environments are not culturable using standard laboratory and pure culture practices. Metagenomics is concerned with sampling and analysis of DNA of all species in a given microbial community and used to evade the limitations of culturing microbes by facilitating direct DNA extraction, sequencing and selection of binning methods for enriching microbial communities. In this chapter, structural and functional approaches of metagenomics will be discussed along with recent trends and applications such as those offered by bioinformatics tools and online databases with respect to next generation sequencing based metagenomics. Furthermore, insights to ‘Meta-Omics’ approaches- metatranscriptomics, metaproteomics and metabolomics to obtain information that complements the metagenomic data will be viewed.