α-amylase breaks down starch into glucose, which can cause blood sugar spikes and increase the risk of type II diabetes. This study tested natural extracts from cassia cinnamon and green tea as alternatives to synthetic inhibitors like acarbose, which can be costly and cause side effects.
Dhar and colleagues established a Type II diabetes mellitus (T2DM) model in fruit flies, using this model to induce insulin resistance and characterize the effects Resveratrol and Pterostilbene on a number of growth and activity metrics. Resveratrol and Pterostilbene treatment notably overturned the weight gain and glucose levels. The results of this study suggest that Drosophila can be utilized as a model organism to study T2DM and novel pharmacological treatments.
The misfolding of proteins leads to numerous diseases including Akzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Type II Diabetes. Understanding of exactly how proteins fold is crucial for many medical advancements. Chenna and Englander addressed this problem by measuring the rate of hydrogen-deuterium exchange within proteins exposed to deuterium oxide in order to further elucidate the process of protein folding. Here, mass spectrometry was used to measure exchange in Cytochrome c and was compared to archived 1H NMR data.
Supernovas are powerful explosions that result from gravitational collapse of a massive star. Using photometric analysis Arora et al. set out to investigate whether 2020pni (located in galaxy UGC 9684) was a supernova. They were ultimately able to identify 2020pni as a Type II-L supernova and determine it's distance from earth.
Cutibacterium acnes is a bacterium believed to play an important role in the pathogenesis of common skin diseases such as acne vulgaris. Currently, acne is known to be associated with strains from the type IA1 and IC clades of C. acnes, while those from the type IA2, IB, II, and III phylogroups are associated with skin health. This is the first study to explore the sequence space of individual gene products of different C. acnes phylogroups. Our analysis compared the sequence space topology of virulence factors to proteins with unknown functions and housekeeping proteins. We hypothesized that sequence space features of virulence factors are different from housekeeping protein features, which potentially provides an avenue to deduce unknown proteins’ functions. This proposition should be confirmed based on further experimental outcomes. A notable similarity in the sequence spaces’ topological features of previously known as housekeeping proteins encoded by recA and guaA genes to ‘putative virulence’ genes camp2 and tly was observed. Our research suggests further investigation of recA and guaA’s potential virulence properties to better understand acne pathogenesis and develop more targeted acne treatments.
In an extensive study of gene mutations, and their resulting effect on protein-protein interactions, Desai and Stork found that HTT-PRPF40B-MECP2 interactions are weakened with progression of Lopes-Maciel-Rodan syndrome.
People with Type One diabetes often rely on Continuous Blood Glucose Monitors (CGMs) to track their blood glucose and manage their condition. Researchers are now working to help people with Type One diabetes more easily monitor their health by developing models that will future blood glucose levels based on CGM readings. Jalla and Ghanta tackle this issue by exploring the use of AI models to forecast blood glucose levels with CGM data.
Anti-diabetic drugs like Metformin are known to increase gut permeability, and this has a negative impact on patient health. These authors hypothesized that this can be mitigated using purple sweet potato extract, which is high anthocyanin content, that feeds bacteria metabolism to decrease gut permeability.