Ethnopharmacological relevance With the spread of Coronavirus Disease (2019) (COVID-19), combination with traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been widely used as a prevention and therapy strategy in China. Xin guan No.1 (XG-1) prescription is a preventive formula recommended by the Hunan Provincial Administration of TCM to prevent the pandemic of COVID-19. Aim of the study To explore the potential preventive mechanisms of XG-1 against COVID-19 in the combination of network pharmacology approach, single-cell RNA expression profiling analysis, molecular docking and retrospective study. Materials and methods Encyclopedia of Traditional Chinese Medicine (ETCM) database was used to determine the meridian tropism, active components and target genes of XG-1. Gene ontology (GO) analysis and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) functional enrichment analysis were conducted by R Cluster Profiler package (3.14.3). Single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data of human lung (GSE122960) was downloaded from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database and analyzed by R Seurat package (3.1.2). Cytoscape (3.7.2) was used to construct the interaction network. The main ingredients in XG-1 were identified by HPLC- Q-TOF- MS and used for molecular docking with COVID-19 3CL hydrolytic enzyme and angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2). A retrospective study of 47 close contact participants from Dongtang Community of Hunan Province was conducted to evaluated the preventive effect of XG-1. Results According to the network pharmacology analysis, XG-1 formula was closely related to lung-, spleen- and stomach-meridians and include a total of 206 active components and 853 target genes. GO and KEGG pathway enrichment revealed that XG-1 mainly regulated cellular amino acid metabolism process and neuroactive ligand-receptors interaction. The scRNA-seq profiling showed that angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) was principally expressed in alveolar type 2 epithelial cells (AT2). 153 genes were up-regulated in AT2 cells expressing ACE2 and 12 genes were obtained by intersecting with XG-1 target genes, of which 3 were related to immunity. Five main chemical ingredients were detected in XG-1 sample by HPLC-Q-TOF-MS. The molecular docking showed that Rutin, Liquiritin and Astragaloside Ⅳ had a good affinity with COVID-19 3CL hydrolytic enzyme and ACE2. Compared with participants who didn't take XG-1, preventive treatment with XG-1gradules resulted in a significant lower rate of testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid (P < 0.0001). Conclusion The present study showed that XG-1 exerts a preventive effect in close contacts against COVID-19. The underlying mechanism may be related to modulate immunity response through multiple components, pathways, and several target genes co-expressed with ACE2. These findings provide preliminary evidences and methodological reference for the potential preventive mechanism of...
Background : Increasing evidence has demonstrated that circular RNAs (circRNAs) participate in epileptogenesis, but the expression profile and role of circRNAs in epilepsy remain unknown. A circRNA microarray was performed to examine epilepsy-related circRNAs. Bioinformatics analyses, luciferin reporter experiments and real-time quantitative PCR (Rt-qPCR) in vitro experiments were performed to demonstrate the mechanism of circRNA-mediated gene regulation of the microglial phenotype under epileptic conditions. Then, to further confirm the effect of circRNAs on nerve damage in the hippocampus, a mouse model of epilepsy was established by intraperitoneal injection of lithium chloride and pilocarpine. Results: The data indicated that 364 circRNAs were differentially expressed comparing epilepsy and control tissues. In particular, mmu_circ_0000335 expression was significantly downregulated in epileptic mice which was confirmed by Rt-qPCR. Overexpression of mmu_circ_0000335 promoted BV2 cell transformation into the M2 macrophage phenotype by increasing expression of CD206, Arg1, Ym1 and IL-10 while decreasing M1 macrophage markers IL-1β, IL-6, TNF-α and IFN-γ expressions under epileptic conditions. mmu_circ_0000335 expression triggered upregulation of Suppressor of Cytokine Signaling 1 (SOCS1) by decreasing miR-19b-3p levels, as determined by luciferase reporter assay. In vivo studies found that mmu_circ_0000335 overexpression decreased epilepsy-induced neural cell apoptosis in the hippocampus by reducing inflammatory cytokine expression. Immunofluorescence detection showed that mmu_circ_0000335 overexpression promoted microglial transformation into the M2 phenotype which had an anti-inflammatory effect. Conclusions: These results collectively indicated that mmu_circ_0000335 was involved in epilepsy progression by functioning as a miR-19b-3p sponge to enhance SOCS1 expression. Thus, mmu_circ_0000335 may be a candidate therapeutic target for epilepsy patients.
Objective Preeclampsia (PE) is a pregnancy-specific multisystem disease as well as an important cause of maternal and perinatal death. This study aimed to analyze the placental transcriptional data and clinical information of PE patients available in the published database and predict the target genes for prevention of PE. Methods The clinical information and corresponding RNA data of PE patients were downloaded from the GEO database. Cluster analysis was performed to examine the correlation between different genotyping genes and clinical manifestations. Then, bioinformatic approaches including GO, KEGG, WGCNA, and GSEA were employed to functionally characterize candidate target genes involved in pathogenesis of PE. Results Two PE datasets GSE60438 and GSE75010 were obtained and combined, thereby providing the data of 205 samples in total (100 non-PE and 105 PE samples). After eliminating the batch effect, we grouped and analyzed the integrated data, and further performed GSEA analysis. It was found that the genes in group 1 and group 2 were different from those in normal samples. Moreover, WGCNA analysis revealed that genes in group 1 were up-regulated in turquoise module, including SASH1 , PIK3CB and FLT-1 , while genes in group 2 were up-regulated in the blue and brown modules. We further conducted GO and KEGG pathway enrichment analyses and found that the differential genes in turquoise module were mainly involved in biological processes such as small molecular catabolic process, while being highly enriched in pathways, including MAPK signaling pathway and Rap1 signaling pathway. Conclusion FLT-1 was conventionally used to predict PE risk, and sFLT-1 could also be used as an indicator to evaluate PE treatment effect. As a candidate biomarker for predicting PE, SASH1 may participate in proliferation, migration, invasion and epithelial mesenchymal transformation of human trophoblast cells by regulating MAPK pathway and Rap1 signaling pathway, thus affecting the progression of PE. The mechanism allowing PIK3CB to regulate PE development was not clear, while the gene could be another candidate biomarker for PE risk prediction. This is an exploratory study and our findings were still required verification in further studies.
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