This is an extensive review of plants used traditionally for women's healthcare in Southeast Asia and surrounding countries. Medicinal plants have a significant role in women's healthcare in many rural areas of the world. Plants with numerous efficacious observations have historically been used as a starting point in the development of new drugs, and a large percentage of modern pharmaceuticals have been derived from medicinal plants.A review was conducted for all plant use mentioned specifically for female healthcare, such as medicine to increase fertility, induce menstruation or abortion, ease pregnancy and parturition, reduce menstrual bleeding and postpartum hemorrhage, alleviate menstrual, parturition and postpartum pain, increase or inhibit lactation, and treat mastitis and uterine prolapse, in 200 studies focusing on medicinal plant use, either general studies or studies focusing specifically on women's healthcare.Nearly 2000 different plant species are reported to be used in over 5000 combinations. Most common are Achyranthes aspera, Artemisia vulgaris, Blumea balsamifera, Carica papaya, Curcuma longa, Hibiscus rosa-sinensis, Leonurus japonicus, Psidium guajava and Ricinus communis, and each of these species had been reported in more than 10 different scientific articles.This review provides a basis for traditional plant use in women's healthcare, and these species can be used as the starting point in the discovery of new drugs.© 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

This review focuses on new endophyte-related findings in biology and ecology, and also summarises the various metabolites isolated from endophytes.

Background: The emergence of next generation sequencing (NGS) has provided the means for rapid and high throughput sequencing and data generation at low cost, while concomitantly creating a new set of challenges. The number of available assembled microbial genomes continues to grow rapidly and their quality reflects the quality of the sequencing technology used, but also of the analysis software employed for assembly and annotation.;Methodology/Principal Findings: In this work, we have explored the quality of the microbial draft genomes across various sequencing technologies. We have compared the draft and finished assemblies of 133 microbial genomes sequenced at the Department of Energy-Joint Genome Institute and finished at the Los Alamos National Laboratory using a variety of combinations of sequencing technologies, reflecting the transition of the institute from Sanger-based sequencing platforms to NGS platforms. The quality of the public assemblies and of the associated gene annotations was evaluated using various metrics. Results obtained with the different sequencing technologies, as well as their effects on downstream processes, were analyzed. Our results demonstrate that the Illumina HiSeq 2000 sequencing system, the primary sequencing technology currently used for de novo genome sequencing and assembly at JGI, has various advantages in terms of total sequence throughput and cost, but it also introduces challenges for the downstream analyses. In all cases assembly results although on average are of high quality, need to be viewed critically and consider sources of errors in them prior to analysis.;Conclusion: These data follow the evolution of microbial sequencing and downstream processing at the JGI from draft genome sequences with large gaps corresponding to missing genes of significant biological role to assemblies with multiple small gaps (Illumina) and finally to assemblies that generate almost complete genomes (Illumina+PacBio).