GPR35 acts a dual role and therapeutic target in inflammation

GPR35 is a G protein-coupled receptor with notable involvement in modulating inflammatory responses. Although the precise role of GPR35 in inflammation is not yet fully understood, studies have suggested that it may have both pro- and anti-inflammatory effects depending on the specific cellular environment. Some studies have shown that GPR35 activation can stimulate the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines and facilitate the movement of immune cells towards inflammatory tissues or infected areas. Conversely, other investigations have suggested that GPR35 may possess anti-inflammatory properties in the gastrointestinal tract, liver and certain other tissues by curbing the generation of inflammatory mediators and endorsing the differentiation of regulatory T cells. The intricate role of GPR35 in inflammation underscores the requirement for more in-depth research to thoroughly comprehend its functional mechanisms and its potential significance as a therapeutic target for inflammatory diseases. The purpose of this review is to concurrently investigate the pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory roles of GPR35, thus illuminating both facets of this complex issue

Pan-Genomic Study of Mycobacterium tuberculosis Reflecting the Primary/Secondary Genes, Generality/Individuality, and the Interconversion Through Copy Number Variations

Tuberculosis (TB) has surpassed HIV as the leading infectious disease killer worldwide since 2014. The main pathogen, Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), contains ~4,000 genes that account for ~90% of the genome. However, it is still unclear which of these genes are primary/secondary, which are responsible for generality/individuality, and which interconvert during evolution. Here we utilized a pan-genomic analysis of 36 Mtb genomes to address these questions. We identified 3,679 Mtb core (i.e., primary) genes, determining their phenotypic generality (e.g., virulence, slow growth, dormancy). We also observed 1,122 dispensable and 964 strain-specific secondary genes, reflecting partially shared and lineage-/strain-specific individualities. Among which, five L2 lineage-specific genes might be related to the increased virulence of the L2 lineage. Notably, we discovered 28 Mtb “Super Core Genes” (SCGs: more than a copy in at least 90% strains), which might be of increased importance, and reflected the “super phenotype generality.” Most SCGs encode PE/PPE, virulence factors, antigens, and transposases, and have been verified as playing crucial roles in Mtb pathogenicity. Further investigation of the 28 SCGs demonstrated the interconversion among SCGs, single-copy core, dispensable, and strain-specific genes through copy number variations (CNVs) during evolution; different mutations on different copies highlight the delicate adaptive-evolution regulation amongst Mtb lineages. This reflects that the importance of genes varied through CNVs, which might be driven by selective pressure from environment/host-adaptation. In addition, compared with Mycobacterium bovis (Mbo), Mtb possesses 48 specific single core genes that partially reflect the differences between Mtb and Mbo individuality

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Aerobic Oxidation of Alcohols to Carbonyl Compounds Catalyzed by Fe(NO3)(3)/4-OH-TEMPO under Mild Conditions

A Fe(NO3)(3)/4-OH-TEMPO catalyst system was developed using the inexpensive organocatalyst 4-hydroxy-2,2,6,6-tetramethyl-piperidyl-1-oxy (4-OH-TEMPO) and the co-catalyst Fe(NO3)(3) center dot 9H(2)O. The catalytic molecular-oxygen-driven oxidation of a broad range of primary and secondary alcohols, which may contain carbon-carbon double bond, N, O, and S heteroatoms, to the corresponding aldehydes and ketones was investigated. The results showed that reaction is highly selective to the desired products when carried out at room temperature in ambient atmosphere air. The mechanism for the catalytic aerobic oxidation of alcohols by Fe (NO3)(3)/4-OH-TEMPO was discussed

Chromatographic methods for the analysis of oligosaccharides in human milk

Human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) are important components in human milk because of their high concentrations and benefits to infant growth. To better understand the relationship between oligosaccharide structures and biofunctions, efficient qualitative and quantitative methods are essential prerequisites. However, HMOs are highly complex and difficult to analyze because of their high polarity, lack of chromophores, and the presence of multiple isomeric structures. Although advanced mass spectrometry can provide much detailed structural information, chromatography is still important to reduce the complexity of HMOs in mixtures. The objective of this review is to describe and discuss the recent advances in the analysis of HMOs with the applications of different chromatographic methods, including gel permeation, high performance anion-exchange, porous graphitized carbon, hydrophilic interaction, reversed-phase high performance liquid chromatography, and capillary electrophoresis. These methods have been used to characterize the structures of HMOs, profile oligosaccharides obtained from the milk of different mothers, and measure the concentration changes in the course of lactations. For each method, we focus on the separation principles, commonly used separation conditions, typical applications, and the ability to resolve the isomers

Characterization of protoberberine alkaloids in Coptidis Rhizoma (Huanglian) by HPLC with ESI-MS/MS

This study aims to qualitatively analyze protoberberine alkaloids in crude extract of Coptidis Rhizoma using HPLC with ESI-MS/MS. Possible specific molecular weights of protoberberine alkaloids were firstly deduced according to literatures and were adopted to screen the alkaloids in the HPLC with ESI-MS of crude extract of Coptidis Rhizoma. As a result, 21 protoberberine alkaloids were found, including compounds of very low concentration and compounds coeluted in one peak. Among these, two compounds were positively identified and verified by comparison with standards. Ten of these compounds were first reported in this study for Coptidis Rhizoma. In addition, chromatographic retention parameters a and c of all compounds were obtained using their retention times under five gradient conditions and were applied to confirm the deduction about the structures of protoberberine alkaloids by tandem mass data

Mixed-mode reversed phase/positively charged repulsion chromatography for intact protein separation

A mixed-mode reversed phase/positively charged repulsion stationary phase C8PN composed of octyl and amino group has been developed for separation of intact protein. Before the separation of proteins, a set of probe compounds were employed to evaluate the chromatographic properties of C8PN, demonstrating typical reversed phase/positively charged repulsion interaction on this stationary phase as estimated. Then the new C8PN stationary phase was used to separate a standard protein mixture on the reversed phase mode. Compared with a commercial C4 stationary phase, it showed different selectivity for some proteins. In order to better understand the properties of C8PN, the effect of acetonitrile content was investigated based on retention equation. Higher values of the equation parameters on C8PN demonstrated that the protein retentions were more sensitive to the change of acetonitrile content. Besides, the influences of buffer salt additives on the protein retentions were also studied. The retention factors of the proteins got larger with the increase of buffer salt concentration, which confirmed the positively charged repulsion interaction on the column. Finally, the C8PN was further applied to separate oxidized and reduced- forms of Recombinant Human Growth Hormone. Our study indicated the advantages and application potential of mixed-mode reversed phase/positively charged repulsion stationary phase for intact protein separation. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

A magnetic restricted access material for rapid solid phase extraction of multiple macrolide antibiotics in honey

A magnetic restricted access material (MRAM) sorbent has been synthesized and for the first time used for the extraction of macrolide antibiotics (MACs). It was prepared using Fe3O4@SiO2 nanoparticles as a support substrate through silanization, atom transfer radical polymerization and hydrolysis reaction. The high magnetic characteristic of the MRAM offers simple isolation from solution and simplified operation procedures as well. The sorbent showed an effective enrichment effect for model MACs (enrichment factor similar to 520) and also a good exclusion effect towards protein. After treatment with the sorbent, liquid chromatography (LC) coupled with a common ultraviolet absorbance detector offered low limits of detection of 0.076-0.286 mu g L-1.. The residue of four model MACs in honey samples was determined with recoveries ranging from 92.7% to 109.3%