The impact of selected xanthophylls on oil hydrolysis by pancreatic lipase: in silico and in vitro studies

Abstract Lipase inhibition is one of the directions to control obesity. In vitro assays have confirmed the inhibitory effect of selected xanthophylls, including astaxanthin, fucoxanthinol, fucoxanthin, and neoxanthin. Similarly, an in-silico study also demonstrated the successful inhibition of pancreatic lipase by astaxanthin. Unfortunately, the efficacy of these protocols in the emulsion state typical of lipid digestion remains untested. To address this issue, the current study employed the pH–stat test, which mimics lipid digestion in the gastrointestinal tract, to evaluate native and prepared sea buckthorn and rapeseed oils with varying xanthophyll contents from 0 to 1400 mg/kg oil. Furthermore, a molecular docking of zeaxanthin and violaxanthin (commonly found in plant-based foods), astaxanthin (widely distributed in foods of marine origin) and orlistat (approved as a drug) was performed. The in-silico studies revealed comparable inhibitory potential of all tested xanthophylls (variation from − 8.0 to − 9.3 kcal/mol), surpassing that of orlistat (− 6.5 kcal/mol). Nonetheless, when tested in an emulsified state, the results of pH–stat digestion failed to establish the inhibitory effect of xanthophylls in the digested oils. In fact, lipolysis of native xanthophyll-rich sea buckthorn oil was approximately 22% higher than that of the xanthophyll-low preparation. The key insight derived from this study is that the amphiphilic properties of xanthophylls during the digestion of xanthophyll-rich lipids/meals facilitate emulsion formation, which leads to enhanced fat lipolysis

Scaffolds for Chondrogenic Cells Cultivation Prepared from Bacterial Cellulose with Relaxed Fibers Structure Induced Genetically

Development of three-dimensional scaffolds mimicking in vivo cells’ environment is an ongoing challenge for tissue engineering. Bacterial nano-cellulose (BNC) is a well-known biocompatible material with enormous water-holding capacity. However, a tight spatial organization of cellulose fibers limits cell ingrowth and restricts practical use of BNC-based scaffolds. The aim of this study was to address this issue avoiding any chemical treatment of natural nanomaterial. Genetic modifications of Komagataeibacter hansenii ATCC 23769 strain along with structural and mechanical properties characterization of obtained BNC membranes were conducted. Furthermore, the membranes were evaluated as scaffolds in in vitro assays to verify cells viability and glycosaminoglycan synthesis by chondrogenic ATDC5 cells line as well as RBL-2H3 mast cells degranulation. K. hansenii mutants with increased cell lengths and motility were shown to produce BNC membranes with increased pore sizes. Novel, BNC membranes with relaxed fiber structure revealed superior properties as scaffolds when compared to membranes produced by a wild-type strain. Obtained results confirm that a genetic modification of productive bacterial strain is a plausible way of adjustment of bacterial cellulose properties for tissue engineering applications without the employment of any chemical modifications

Novel Bionanocellulose/κ-Carrageenan Composites for Tissue Engineering

In this work, novel bacterial cellulose/κ-carrageenan (BNC/κ-Car) composites, being potential scaffolds for tissue engineering (TE), and outperforming the two polymers when used as scaffolds separately, were for the first time obtained using an in situ method, based on the stationary culture of bacteria Komagateibacter xylinus E25. The composites were compared with native BNC in terms of the morphology of fibers, chemical composition, crystallinity, tensile and compression strength, water holding capacity, water retention ratio and swelling properties. Murine chondrogenic ATDC5 cells were applied to assess the utility of the BNC/κ-Car composites as potential scaffolds. The impact of the composites on the cells viability, chondrogenic differentiation, and expression patterns of Col1α1, Col2α1, Runx2, and Sox9, which are indicative of ATDC5 chondrogenic differentiation, was determined. None of the composites obtained in this study caused the chondrocyte hypertrophy. All of them supported the differentiation of ATDC5 cells to more chondrogenic phenotype

Large-Scale Parallelization of Human Migration Simulation

Forced displacement of people worldwide, for example, due to violent conflicts, is common in the modern world, and today more than 82 million people are forcibly displaced. This puts the problem of migration at the forefront of the most important problems of humanity. The Flee simulation code is an agent-based modeling tool that can forecast population displacements in civil war settings, but performing accurate simulations requires nonnegligible computational capacity. In this article, we present our approach to Flee parallelization for fast execution on multicore platforms, as well as discuss the computational complexity of the algorithm and its implementation. We benchmark parallelized code using supercomputers equipped with AMD EPYC Rome 7742 and Intel Xeon Platinum 8268 processors and investigate its performance across a range of alternative rule sets, different refinements in the spatial representation, and various numbers of agents representing displaced persons. We find that Flee scales excellently to up to 8192 cores for large cases, although very detailed location graphs can impose a large initialization time overhead

The insulinotropic activity of oleosomes prepared from various sea buckthorn cultivars in mouse and human pancreatic β cell lines

Sea buckthorn berries contain numerous bioactive lipids such as fatty acids, carotenoids, tocols, and sterols. Among fatty acids, a high concentration of rare in nature palmitoleic acid is characteristic of sea buckthorn pulp oil. We previously showed the potency of pulp oil from the Luczystaja cultivar to augment glucose-induced insulin secretion in pancreatic β cells. Since the composition of sea buckthorn berries varies depending on the cultivar, here we compared the activity of oleosomes from Botaniczeskaja Ljubitelskaja, Golden Rain, Prozracznaja, Maryna and Luczystaja cultivars in two different pancreatic cell lines, a mouse MIN6 and human EndoC-betaH1. Besides the characterization of particle size and ζ-potential, we evaluated the influence of crude and digested oleosomes on cell viability, insulin secretion, and intracellular calcium mobilization. Additionally, the antioxidant activity measured with the 2,2′-azino-bis(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid) (ABTS•+) radical cation-based assay was determined and compared

Lysophosphatidylcholines Enriched with <i>cis</i> and <i>trans</i> Palmitoleic Acid Regulate Insulin Secretion via GPR119 Receptor

Among lipids, lysophosphatidylcholines (LPCs) with various fatty acyl chains have been identified as potential agonists of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). Recently, targeting GPCRs has been switched to diabetes and obesity. Concomitantly, our last findings indicate the insulin secretagogue properties of cis and trans palmitoleic acid (16:1, n-7) resulting from GPCR activation, however, associated with different signaling pathways. We here report the synthesis of LPCs bearing two geometrical isomers of palmitoleic acids and investigation of their impact on human pancreatic β cells viability, insulin secretion, and activation of four GPCRs previously demonstrated to be targeted by free fatty acids and LPCs. Moreover, molecular modeling was exploited to investigate the probable binding sites of tested ligands and calculate their affinity toward GPR40, GPR55, GPR119, and GPR120 receptors