Enhancing the hepatic protective effect of genistein by oral administration with stachyose in mice with chronic high fructose diet consumption.

Dietary supplementation of soy stachyose or genistein is known to be of hepatoprotective health interest. This study showed that co-administration of genistein and stachyose caused stronger inhibition on abnormal weight gain and liver fat accumulation by decreasing fatty acid synthetase expression and balancing disorderly lipid metabolism than that of genistein or stachyose alone in high-fructose (HF) diet-fed mice. Furthermore, the production of malonaldehyde and carbonyl derivatives of proteins was also more effectively inhibited by co-treatment of genistein and stachyose, and thereby glutathione peroxidase and superoxide dismutase activities were elevated in HF-fed mice. Moreover, genistein in combination with stachyose was more effective to reduce the impact of HF on the serum markers of liver damage by inhibiting inflammatory cytokine release than stachyose or genistein alone in mice. The potential mechanism was that stachyose enhanced absorption of genistein in HF-fed mice by oral supplementation of genistein together with stachyose. These findings indicate that co-ingestion of stachyose and genistein may serve as a novel strategy for hepatic protection.

A novel process for obtaining pinosylvin using combinatorial bioengineering in Escherichia coli.

Pinosylvin as a bioactive stilbene is of great interest for food supplements and pharmaceuticals development. In comparison to conventional extraction of pinosylvin from plant sources, biosynthesis engineering of microbial cell factories is a sustainable and flexible alternative method. Current synthetic strategies often require expensive phenylpropanoic precursor and inducer, which are not available for large-scale fermentation process. In this study, three bioengineering strategies were described to the development of a simple and economical process for pinosylvin biosynthesis in Escherichia coli. Firstly, we evaluated different construct environments to give a highly efficient constitutive system for enzymes of pinosylvin pathway expression: 4-coumarate: coenzyme A ligase (4CL) and stilbene synthase (STS). Secondly, malonyl coenzyme A (malonyl-CoA) is a key precursor of pinosylvin bioproduction and at low level in E. coli cell. Thus clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats interference (CRISPRi) was explored to inactivate malonyl-CoA consumption pathway to increase its availability. The resulting pinosylvin content in engineered E. coli was obtained a 1.9-fold increase depending on the repression of fabD (encoding malonyl-CoA-ACP transacylase) gene. Eventually, a phenylalanine over-producing E. coli consisting phenylalanine ammonia lyase was introduced to produce the precursor of pinosylvin, trans-cinnamic acid, the crude extraction of cultural medium was used as supplementation for pinosylvin bioproduction. Using these combinatorial processes, 47.49 mg/L pinosylvin was produced from glycerol.

Detection and confirmation of alkaloids in leaves of Justicia adhatoda and bioinformatics approach to elicit its anti-tuberculosis activity.

The extraction and determination of alkaloids was performed and confirmed by phytochemical analysis. Six different quinazoline alkaloids (vasicoline, vasicolinone, vasicinone, vasicine, adhatodine and anisotine) were found in the leaf of Justicia adhatoda (J. adhatoda). The presence of the peaks obtained through HPLC indicated the diverse nature of alkaloid present in the leaf. The enzyme ß-ketoacyl-acyl-carrier protein synthase III that catalyses the initial step of fatty acid biosynthesis (FabH) via a type II fatty acid synthase has unique structural features and universal occurrence in Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis). Thus, it was considered as a target for designing of anti-tuberculosis compounds. Docking simulations were conducted on the above alkaloids derived from J. adhatoda. The combination of docking/scoring provided interesting insights into the binding of different inhibitors and their activity. These results will be useful for designing inhibitors for M. tuberculosis and also will be a good starting point for natural plant-based pharmaceutical chemistry.