Isolation of Chalcomoracin as a Potential α-Glycosidase Inhibitor from Mulberry Leaves and Its Binding Mechanism.

Diabetes is a chronic metabolic disease, whereas α-glucosidases are key enzymes involved in the metabolism of starch and glycogen. There is a long history of the use of mulberry leaf (the leaf of ) as an antidiabetic herb in China, and we found that chalcomoracin, one of the specific Diels-Alder adducts in mulberry leaf, had prominent α-glucosidase inhibitory activity and has the potential to be a substitute for current hypoglycemic drugs such as acarbose, which have severe gastrointestinal side effects. In this study, chalcomoracin was effectively isolated from mulberry leaves, and its α-glucosidase inhibition was studied via enzymatic kinetics, isothermal titration (ITC) and molecular docking.

Chemotaxonomic investigation of plant terpenoids with an established database (TeroMOL).

Terpenoids constitute the biggest class of plant-derived natural products with diverse chemical structures and extensive biological activities. Interpreting enzyme functions and mining new structures of terpenoids could be inspired by the cheminformatic and chemotaxonomic analysis, whereas it is hampered by the incompleteness of available data for terpenoids. Here a dedicated terpenoids database, TeroMOL, is developed to collect more than 170 000 terpenoids and their derivatives annotated with reported biological sources, along with a user-friendly and freely accessible webserver to visualise and analyse the terpenoids skeletons and organism sources.

TeroKit: A Database-Driven Web Server for Terpenome Research.

Natural products are the major resource of drug discovery, and terpenoids represent the largest family of natural products. Terpenome is defined as all terpenoid-like and terpenoid-derived natural compounds, including the terpenoids, steroids, and their derivatives. Herein, aiming to navigate the chemical and biological space of terpenome, the first comprehensive database dedicated to terpenome research has been developed by collecting over 110 000 terpenome molecules from various resources, distributed in 14 351 species, belonging to 1109 families, and showing activity against 1366 biological targets.