******************* Zoom Link to Join: https://zoom.us/j/9071552168?omn=91327579187 Meeting ID: 907 155 2168 Passcode: 813471 ******************* The world we live in is composed of chemicals, which can have either beneficial or harmful effects on human health. Beyond chemical exposures, physical environmental factors, such as ultraviolet (UV) radiation, can also influence human health. Among the beneficial chemicals are plant secondary metabolites, which often serve as defence mechanisms in plants, and can have therapeutic applications. In contrast, endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), which are present in many everyday products, can interfere with normal endocrine function. Against this background, my thesis addresses two objectives: (a) to characterise the natural product chemical space and investigate its therapeutic relevance, and (b) to characterise biological responses to environmental exposures and investigate chemical-target activity relationships. To address the first objective, we curated the chemical profiles of essential oils from aromatic Indian medicinal plants, along with extensive metadata, and made the data available through the sCentInDB database (https://cb.imsc.res.in/scentindb/). We analysed the structural and scaffold diversity of the chemical space using chemical similarity networks and cyclic systems retrieval curves. Our analyses showed that sCentInDB exhibits a level of chemical diversity comparable to that of other aroma-related databases. This resource can support research relevant to the conservation of aromatic medicinal plants, the establishment of quality standards for essential oils, and applications in the perfumery, flavouring, and pharmaceutical industries. We further explored how integrating traditional medicinal knowledge with phytochemical information could facilitate the investigation of therapeutic applications. To this end, we updated IMPPAT, a database of Indian medicinal plants, their phytochemicals, and their therapeutic uses at the plant-part level, to build IMPPAT 3.0. The updated database incorporates information on single herbal drugs (SHDs) and polyherbal formulations (PHFs) used in Ayurveda. The compiled data is accessible via https://cb.imsc.res.in/imppat/. Also, the data is used to develop a knowledge graph, IMPPAT-KG. Lastly, we demonstrated the utility of IMPPAT 3.0 through a network medicine analysis of SHDs indicated for rheumatoid arthritis. To address the second objective, we first curated information on the differential expression of biomolecules, including genes, proteins, metabolites, and microRNAs (miRNAs), in response to UV radiation. This information is available through the UVREK database (https://cb.imsc.res.in/uvrek/). We performed enrichment analyses to identify the biological processes, molecular functions, and pathways associated with UV responses. This FAIR-compliant database provides a resource for investigating the molecular responses to UV exposure and identifying candidate biomarkers that may contribute to risk stratification and the detection of UV-associated disorders. We then shifted our focus from physical to chemical exposures by investigating the structure-activity relationships of environmental chemicals which can bind to multiple endocrine receptors. Data from the ToxCast project are widely used to develop computational models for predicting the biological activities and potential toxicity of environmental chemicals. We investigated activity cliffs in these data, which are structurally similar chemicals that exhibit substantial differences in activity. We also identified instances in which multitarget activity cliffs corresponded to matched molecular pairs (MMPs). Structural classification of these cliffs provided insights into the chemical features associated with changes in receptor activity. Altogether, my thesis characterises two aspects of chemical space relevant to human health: the therapeutic potential of natural products and the biological effects of environmental stressors. By developing curated FAIR-complaint databases and applying computational and network-based analyses, this work contributes resources and methods for exploring the therapeutic relevance of natural products and understanding biological responses to physical and chemical environmental exposures.

A vector partition of a vector v is an (unordered) decomposition of v as a sum of non-zero vectors with non-negative integer entries. We will discuss the relevance of these functions in the problem of plethysm, which lies at the heart of combinatorial representation theory. We will mention some open problems in this area. Number theorists may find the connections to classical partition theory of particular interest.

How much information can a physical system carry? For a standard d-level quantum system, the fundamental limit is log d bits of classical information. Conventional notion, together with the recent intuition, suggests that adding noise shouldn't change the big picture: a noisy quantum channel should perform much like an equally noisy classical channel. But does the same analogy still hold when we introduce additional resources over noisy quantum communication? In this talk, we explore two scenarios where the intuition drastically fails. We will show that when assisted by additional resources, the true classical communication capacity of a noisy quantum system can dramatically outperform its classical counterpart. Beyond revealing a fascinating, unexplored caveat in the foundations of information theory, these results suggest new design principles for the architecture of future quantum networks. Join Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/91431488789 Meeting ID: 914 3148 8789 Passcode: 009545