Self-assembling natural drug hydrogels formed without structural modification and able to act as carriers are of interest for biomedical applications. A lack of knowledge about natural drug gels limits there current application. Here, we report on rhein, a herbal natural product, which is directly self-assembled into hydrogels through noncovalent interactions. This hydrogel shows excellent stability, sustained release and reversible stimuli-responses. The hydrogel consists of a three-dimensional nanofiber network that prevents premature degradation. Moreover, it easily enters cells and binds to toll-like receptor 4. This enables rhein hydrogels to significantly dephosphorylate IκBα, inhibiting the nuclear translocation of p65 at the NFκB signalling pathway in lipopolysaccharide-induced BV2 microglia. Subsequently, rhein hydrogels alleviate neuroinflammation with a long-lasting effect and little cytotoxicity compared to the equivalent free-drug in vitro. This study highlights a direct self-assembly hydrogel from natural small molecule as a promising neuroinflammatory therapy.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Metabolic profiling has increasingly been used as a probe in disease diagnosis and pharmacological analysis. Herein, plasma fatty acid metabolic profiling including non-esterified fatty acid (NEFA) and esterified fatty acid (EFA) was investigated using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) followed by multivariate statistical analysis. Partial least squares-linear discrimination analysis (PLS-LDA) model was established and validated to pattern discrimination between type 2 diabetic mellitus (DM-2) patients and health controls, and to extract novel biomarker information. Furthermore, the PLS-LDA model visually represented the alterations of NEFA metabolic profiles of diabetic patients with abdominal obesity in the treated process with rosiglitazone. The GC/MS-PLS-LDA analysis allowed comprehensive detection of plasma fatty acid, enabling fatty acid metabolic characterization of DM-2 patients, which included biomarkers different from health controls and dynamic change of NEFA profiles of patients after treated with medicine. This method might be a complement or an alternative to pathogenesis and pharmacodynamics research.

Traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) are getting more and more popular nowadays in the whole world for improving health condition of human beings as well as preventing and healing diseases. TCM is a multi-component system with components mostly unknown, and only a few compounds are responsible for the pharmaceutical and/or toxic effects. The large numbers of other components in the TCM make the screening and analysis of the bioactive components extremely difficult. So, separation and analysis of the desired chemical components in TCM are very important subjects for modernization research of TCM. Thus, many novel separation techniques with significant advantages over conventional methods were introduced and applied to separation and analysis of the chemical constituents in TCM. This review presents just a brief outline of the applications of different separation methods for the isolation and analysis of TCM constituents.

No abstract

No abstract