[Research advance in metabolism of effective ingredients from traditional Chinese medicines by probiotics].

The pharmacological activity of active ingredients from Chinese medicine depends greatly on the microecological environment of probiotics in the human body. After effective ingredients from traditional Chinese medicines are metabolized or biotransformed by probiotics, their metabolites can increase pharmacological activity, and can be absorbed more easily to improve the bioavailability. Therefore, the combination of Chinese medicines with probiotics is the innovation point in R&D of functional food and Chinese medicines, and also a new thinking for the modernization of Chinese medicine.This review summarizes and analyses the research progress on metabolism effects of gut microbiota on Chinese medicines components, the regulating effect of effective ingredients from Chinese medicine on intestinal probiotics, the application status of probiotics in traditional Chinese medicines, and the main problems and prospects in the research and development of Chinese medicines products with probiotic, aiming to provide theoretical guidance and practical value for the fermentation engineering of Chinese herbal medicine.

Global identification of significantly expressed genes in developing endosperm of rice by expression sequence tags and cDNA array approaches.

Rice endosperm plays a very important role in seedling germination and determines the qualities of rice grain. Although studies on specific gene categories in endosperm have been carried out, global view of gene expression at a transcription level in rice endosperm is still limited. To gain a better understanding of the global and tissue-specific gene expression profiles in rice endosperm, a cDNA library from rice endosperm of immature seeds was sequenced. A cDNA array was constructed based on the tentative unique transcripts derived from expression sequence tag (EST) assembling results and then hybridized with cDNAs from five different tissues or organs including endosperm, embryo, leaf, stem and root of rice. Significant redundancy was found for genes encoding prolamin, glutelin, allergen, and starch synthesis proteins, accounting for approximately 34% of the total ESTs obtained. The cDNA array revealed 87 significantly expressed genes in endosperm compared with the other four organs or tissues. These genes included 13 prolamin family proteins, 17 glutelin family proteins, 12 binding proteins, nine catalytic proteins and four ribosomal proteins, indicating a complicated biological processing in rice endosperm. In addition, Northern verification of 1,4-alpha-glucan branching enzyme detected two isoforms in rice endosperm, the larger one of which only existed in endosperm.

Application of cDNA array for studying the gene expression profile of mature appressoria of Magnaporthe grisea.

Appressorium is an infection structure of the phytopathogenic fungus Magnaporthe grisea. Analysis of gene expression profiles of appressorium development provides insight into the molecular basis of pathogenicity and control of this fungal plant disease. A cDNA array representing 2927 unique genes based on a large EST (expressed sequence tag) database of M. grisea strain Y34 was constructed and used to profile the gene expression patterns at mycelium and appressorium maturation stages. Compared with mycelia, 55 up-regulated and 22 down-regulated genes were identified in mature appressoria. Among 77 genes, 16 genes showed no similarity to the genome sequences of M. grisea. A novel homologue of peptidyl-prolyl cis-trans isomerase was found to be expressed at low-level in mature appressoria of M. grisea. The results indicated that the genes such as pyruvate carboxylase, phospholipid metabolism-related protein and glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase involved in gluconeogenesis, lipid metabolism and glycolysis, showed differential expression in mature appressoria. Furthermore, genes such as PTH11, beta subunit of G protein and SGT1 involved in cell signalling, were expressed differentially in mature appressoria. Northern blot analysis was used to confirm the cDNA array results.

An exploration of 3'-end processing signals and their tissue distribution in Oryza sativa.

The 3' untranslated regions deeply affect many properties of eukaryotic mRNA. In plants, the polyadenine control signals contained in these regions seem to be more variable than of mammals. Three cDNA libraries derived from the leaf, endosperm and stem tissues of rice were sequenced from the 3'-end. Of the 9911 transcripts analyzed, 5723 unique transcripts were identified from the leaf sequences, 2934 from the endosperm and 1254 from the stem. The information entropy and two statistical methods were used to compile a list of rice poly(A) control signals. Based on their distribution, these signals can be roughly grouped into far-upstream element (FUE), near-upstream element (NUE), T-rich region (TRE) and downstream element (DE). The distribution of rice conserved regions is similar to the previous model from Arabidopsis and yeast, with a few differences in word constructions. Interestingly, we also found the word distributions were diverse in the cleavage site of downstream sequences of different rice tissues. The signal bias in downstream sequences may lead mRNA to be differently cleaved in different rice tissues.

Analysis of expressed sequence tag data and gene expression profiles involved in conidial germination of Fusarium oxysporum.

We obtained 3,372 tentative unique transcripts (TUTs) from a cDNA library of Fusarium oxysporum. A cDNA array with 3,158 TUTs was produced to analyze gene expression profiles in conidial germination. It seems that ras and other signaling genes, e.g., ccg, cooperatively initiate conidial germination in Fusarium by increasing protein synthesis.