Alzheimer’s disease (AD) accounts for two-thirds of all dementia cases, affecting 50 million people worldwide. Only four of the more than 100 AD drugs developed thus far have successfully improved AD symptoms. Furthermore, these improvements are only temporary, as no treatment can stop or reverse AD progression. A growing number of recent studies have demonstrated that iron-dependent programmed cell death, known as ferroptosis, contributes to AD-mediated nerve cell death. The ferroptosis pathways within nerve cells include iron homeostasis regulation, cystine/glutamate (Glu) reverse transporter (system xc⁻), glutathione (GSH)/glutathione peroxidase 4 (GPX4), and lipid peroxidation. In the regulation pathway of AD iron homeostasis, abnormal iron uptake, excretion and storage in nerve cells lead to increased intracellular free iron and Fenton reactions. Furthermore, decreased Glu transporter expression leads to Glu accumulation outside nerve cells, resulting in the inhibition of the system xc⁻ pathway. GSH depletion causes abnormalities in GPX4, leading to excessive accumulation of lipid peroxides. Alterations in these specific pathways and amino acid metabolism eventually lead to ferroptosis. This review explores the connection between AD and the ferroptosis signaling pathways and amino acid metabolism, potentially informing future AD diagnosis and treatment methodologies.

To test the effects of salidroside on formation and growth of glioma together with tumor microenvironment. Salidroside extracted from Rhodiola rosea was purified and treated on human glioma cells U251 at the concentration of 20 µg/mL. 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-dephenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) assay for cytotoxicity and flow cytometry (FCM) for cell cycle analysis were performed. Then for in vivo study, xenotransplantation tumor model in nude mice was generated and treated with salidroside at the concentration of 50 mg/kg.d for totally 20 d. Body weight and tumor size were detected every 2 d after the treatment. The levels of 8-isoprostane, superoxide dismutase (SOD) and malondialdehyde (MDA), special markers for oxidative stress, were detected while immunofluoresence staining was performed for astrocyte detection. For in vitro study, salidroside could decrease the viability of human glioma cells U251 and the growth of U251 cells at G0/G1 checkpoint during the cell cycle. For in vivo study, salidroside could also inhibit the growth of human glioma tissue in nude mice. The body weight of these nude mice treated with salidroside did not decrease as quickly as control group. In the tumor xenotransplantation nude mice model, mice were found of inhibition of oxidative stress by detection of biomarkers. Furthermore, overgrowth of astrocytes due to the stimulation of oxidative stress in the cortex of brain was inhibited after the treatment of salidroside. Salidroside could inhibit the formation and growth of glioma both in vivo and in vitro and improve the tumor microenvironment via inhibition of oxidative stress and astrocytes.

Background: Currently, a number of yeast genomes with different physiological features have been sequenced and annotated, which provides invaluable information to investigate yeast genetics, evolutionary mechanism, structure and function of gene families. Description: YeastWeb is a novel database created to provide access to gene families derived from the available yeast genomes by assigning the genes into putative families. It has many useful features that complement existing databases, such as SGD, CYGD and Génolevures: 1) Detailed computational annotation was conducted with each entry with InterProScan, EMBOSS and functional/pathway databases, such as GO, COG and KEGG; 2) A well established user-friendly environment was created to allow users to retrieve the annotated genes and gene families using functional classification browser, keyword search or similarity-based search; 3) Workset offers users many powerful functions to manage the retrieved data efficiently, associate the individual items easily and save the intermediate results conveniently; 4) A series of comparative genomics and molecular evolution analysis tools are neatly implemented to allow users to view multiple sequence alignments and phylogenetic tree of gene families. At present, YeastWeb holds the gene families clustered from various MCL inflation values from a total of 13 available yeast genomes. Conclusions: Given the great interest in yeast research, YeastWeb has the potential to become a useful resource for the scientific community of yeast biologists and related researchers investigating the evolutionary relationship of yeast gene families. YeastWeb is available at http://centre.bioinformatics.zj.cn/Yeast/.