16 research outputs found
The influence of bile acids homeostasis by cryptotanshinone-containing herbs
Background: Herbs might affect the homeostasis of bile acids through influence of multiple metabolic pathways of bile acids. Aim: The present study aims to investigate the inhibition of cryptotanshinone towards the glucuronidation of LCA, trying to indicate the possible influence of cryptotanshinone-containing herbs towards the homeostasis of bile acids. Methods: The LCA-3-glucuronidation and LCA-24-glucuronidation reaction was monitored by LC-MS. Results: Initial screening showed that 100 μM of cryptotanshinone inhibited LCA-24-glucuronidation and LCA-3-glucuronidation reaction activity by 82.6% and 79.1%, respectively. This kind of inhibition behaviour exerted cryptotanshinone concentrations-dependent and LCA concentrations-independent inhibition behaviour. Conclusion: All these data indicated the possibility of cryptotanshinone’s influence towards the bile acids metabolism and homeostasis of bile acids.Keywords: herbs, lithocholic acid (LCA), homeostasisAfrican Health sciences Vol 14 No. 1 March 201
ProRes: Exploring Degradation-aware Visual Prompt for Universal Image Restoration
Image restoration aims to reconstruct degraded images, e.g., denoising or
deblurring. Existing works focus on designing task-specific methods and there
are inadequate attempts at universal methods. However, simply unifying multiple
tasks into one universal architecture suffers from uncontrollable and undesired
predictions. To address those issues, we explore prompt learning in universal
architectures for image restoration tasks. In this paper, we present
Degradation-aware Visual Prompts, which encode various types of image
degradation, e.g., noise and blur, into unified visual prompts. These
degradation-aware prompts provide control over image processing and allow
weighted combinations for customized image restoration. We then leverage
degradation-aware visual prompts to establish a controllable and universal
model for image restoration, called ProRes, which is applicable to an extensive
range of image restoration tasks. ProRes leverages the vanilla Vision
Transformer (ViT) without any task-specific designs. Furthermore, the
pre-trained ProRes can easily adapt to new tasks through efficient prompt
tuning with only a few images. Without bells and whistles, ProRes achieves
competitive performance compared to task-specific methods and experiments can
demonstrate its ability for controllable restoration and adaptation for new
tasks. The code and models will be released in
\url{https://github.com/leonmakise/ProRes}
The influence of bile acids homeostasis by cryptotanshinone-containing herbs
Background: Herbs might affect the homeostasis of bile acids through
influence of multiple metabolic pathways of bile acids. Objective:To
investigate the inhibition of cryptotanshinone towards the
glucuronidation of LCA, trying to indicate the possible influence of
cryptotanshinone-containing herbs towards the homeostasis of bile
acids. Methods:The LCA-3-glucuronidation and LCA-24-glucuronidation
reaction was monitored by LC-MS. Results:Initial screening showed that
100 μM of cryptotanshinone inhibited LCA-24-glucuronidation and
LCA-3-glucuro-nidation reaction activity by 82.6% and 79.1%,
respectively. This kind of inhibition behaviour exerted
cryptotanshinone concentrations-dependent and LCA
concentrations-independent inhibition behaviour. Conclusion: All these
data indicated the possibility of cryptotanshinone’s influence
towards bile acids metabolism and homeostasis of bile acids
Probe substrate and enzyme source-dependent inhibition of UDPglucuronosyltransferase (UGT) 1A9 by wogonin
Background: Drug-metabolizing enzymes (DMEs) inhibition based drug-drug
interaction and herb-drug interaction severely challenge the R&D
process of drugs or herbal ingredients. Objective: To evaluate the
inhibition potential of wogonin (an important flavonoid isolated from
the root of Scutellaria baicalensis ) towards one of the most
important phase II DMEs, UDP-glucuronosyltransferase (UGT) 1A9.
Methods: Both recombinant UGT1A9-catalyzed 4-methylumbelliferone (4-MU)
glucuronidation reaction and human liver microsomes (HLMs)-catalyzed
propofol glucuronidation reaction were used as two different probe
reactions. Results: Wogonin noncompetitively inhibited recombinant
UGT1A9-catalyzed 4-MU glucuronidation, and exerted competitive
inhibition towards HLMs-catalyzed propofol glucuronidation. The
inhibition kinetic parameters (Ki) were calculated to be 3.2 μM
and 52.0μM, respectively. Conclusion: Necessary monitoring was
needed when wogonin was co-administered with the clinical drugs mainly
undergoing UGT1A9-mediated glucuronidation elimination. Additionally,
probe reactions-dependent inhibition of wogonin towards the activity of
UGT1A9 should be paid attention when translating these in vitro data
into in vivo situation