Simiao Decoction Alleviates Gouty Arthritis by Modulating Proinflammatory Cytokines and the Gut Ecosystem

Abstract The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) provides a large suite of online resources for biological information and data, including the GenBank® nucleic acid sequence database and the PubMed database of citations and abstracts for published life science journals. The Entrez system provides search and retrieval operations for most of these data from 39 distinct databases. The E-utilities serve as the programming interface for the Entrez system. Augmenting many of the Web applications are custom implementations of the BLAST program optimized to search specialized data sets. New resources released in the past year include PubMed Data Management, RefSeq Functional Elements, genome data download, variation services API, Magic-BLAST, QuickBLASTp, and Identical Protein Groups. Resources that were updated in the past year include the genome data viewer, a human genome resources page, Gene, virus variation, OSIRIS, and PubChem. All of these resources can be accessed through the NCBI home page at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

The microbiota plays a central role in human health and disease by shaping immune development, immune responses, metabolism, and protecting from invading pathogens. Technical advances that allow comprehensive characterization of microbial communities by genetic sequencing have sparked the hunt for disease modulating bacteria. Emerging studies in humans have linked increased abundance of Prevotella species at mucosal sites to localized and systemic disease, including periodontitis, bacterial vaginosis, rheumatoid arthritis, metabolic disorders, and low-grade systemic inflammation. Intriguingly, Prevotella abundance is reduced within the lung microbiota of asthma and COPD. Increased Prevotella abundance is associated with augmented Th17-mediated mucosal inflammation, which is in line with the marked capacity of Prevotella in driving Th17 immune responses in vitro. Studies indicate, that Prevotella predominantly activate TLR2 leading to production of Th17-polarizing cytokines by antigen presenting cells, including IL-23 and IL-1. Furthermore, Prevotella stimulate epithelial cells to produce IL-8, IL-6 and CCL20, which can promote mucosal Th17 immune responses and neutrophil recruitment. Prevotella-mediated mucosal inflammation leads to systemic dissemination of inflammatory mediators, bacteria, and bacterial products, which in turn may affect systemic disease outcomes. Studies in mice support a causal role of Prevotella as colonization experiments promote clinical and inflammatory features of human disease. When compared to strict commensal bacteria, Prevotella exhibit increased inflammatory properties as demonstrated by augmented release of inflammatory mediators from immune cells and various stromal cells. These findings indicate that some Prevotella strains may be clinically important pathobionts that can participate in human disease by promoting chronic inflammation. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Abstract As a traditional medical intervention in Asia and a complementary and alternative medicine in western countries, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is capturing worldwide attention in life science field. Traditional Chinese Medicine Integrated Database (TCMID), which was originally launched in 2013, was a comprehensive database aiming at TCM’s modernization and standardization. It has been highly recognized among pharmacologists and scholars in TCM researches. The latest release, TCMID 2.0 (http://www.megabionet.org/tcmid/), replenished the preceding database with 18 203 herbal ingredients, 15 prescriptions, 82 related targets, 1356 drugs, 842 diseases and numerous new connections between them. Considering that chemical changes might take place in decocting process of prescriptions, which may result in new ingredients, new data containing the prescription ingredients was collected in current version. In addition, 778 herbal mass spectrometry (MS) spectra related to 170 herbs were appended to show the variation of herbal quality in different origin and distinguish genuine medicinal materials from common ones while 3895 MS spectra of 729 ingredients were added as the supplementary materials of component identification. With the significant increase of data, TCMID 2.0 will further facilitate TCM’s modernization and enhance the exploration of underlying biological processes that are response to the diverse pharmacologic actions of TCM.