Stabilization of zeylenone in rat plasma by the presence of esterase inhibitors and its LC‐MS/MS assay for pharmacokinetic study

Six esterase inhibitors, namely EDTA·2Na⁺, NaF, phenylmethanesulfonyl fluoride, dichlorvos, bis‐nitrophenyl phosphate (BNPP) and thenoyltrifluoroacetone, and the mixture of NaF and BNPP, were evaluated for the stabilization of labile benzoate containing zeylenone in rat plasma. The mixture appeared to exhibit the most effectively stabilizing effect with the degraded content of zeylenone decreasing from >60% (in the absence of inhibitors) to <6%. Following the stabilization by the addition of NaF (5 mm ) and BNPP (5 mm ), the analytes in rat plasma were acidified by formic acid and extracted into ethyl acetate at 0°C. After chromatographic separation, the detection of zeylenone was performed on a 3200 Q‐Trap with positive ion electrospray mode, monitoring the ion transition m/z 383.2 → 105.0. The method was validated over the range from 2.68 to 1340 ng/mL with inter‐ and intra‐run precision for the quality control samples being less than 6.8%. The assay accuracy was within 100 ± 7.0%. The validated method was successfully applied to a pharmacokinetic study in rats after the intratracheal administration of zeylenone in free drug or polymeric micellar solutions. The results showed that the pulmonary absorption of zeylenone loaded in micelles was significantly retarded compared with that of free drug solutions. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Synthesis and biological evaluation of novel 1, 2, 3-benzotriazin-4-one derivatives as leukotriene A4 hydrolase aminopeptidase inhibitors

A series of novel 1,2,3-benzotriazin-4-one derivatives were designed,synthesized and their inhibitory activities against leulcotriene A_4 hydrolase aminopeptidase in vitro were evaluated.Many compounds showed moderate to good activities at the concentration of 10 μmol/L.Among them,compound Ⅳ-16 exhibited the highest inhibitory activity up to 80.6% with an IC_(50) of 1.30 ± 0.20 μmol/L The compound Ⅳ-16 was also tested the proliferation inhibitory activities in THP1 human AML cell line and its binding model with LTA_4H enzyme by molecular docking was studied.It indicated that 1,2,3-benzotriazin-4-one was a promising scaffold for further study.The relationship between structure and inhibitory activity was also preliminarily discussed.     

Design,synthesis, and biological evaluation of indolylidinepyrazolones as potential anti-bacterial agents

A series of indolylidinepyrazolones were synthesized using a simple, green, and effective route and evaluated as anti-bacterial agents. The compounds were further studied via structure-guided docking study. One of the compounds exhibiting H-bonding interactions with conserved residue Arg144 turned out to be the most potent compound of the series. The minimum inhibitory concentration values ranged from 50 to 25 μg/mL against Staphylococcus aureus in their anti microbial evaluation.     

Tunable Probes with Direct Fluorescence Signals for the Constitutive and Immunoproteasome

Electrophiles are commonly used for the inhibition of proteases. Notably, inhibitors of the proteasome, a central determinant of cellular survival and a target of several FDA‐approved drugs, are mainly characterized by the reactivity of their electrophilic head groups. We aimed to tune the inhibitory strength of peptidic sulfonate esters by varying the leaving groups. Indeed, proteasome inhibition correlated well with the pK_a of the leaving group. The use of fluorophores as leaving groups enabled us to design probes that release a stoichiometric fluorescence signal upon reaction, thereby directly linking proteasome inactivation to the readout. This principle could be applicable to other sulfonyl fluoride based inhibitors and allows the design of sensitive probes for enzymatic studies.     

An improved ensemble learning machine for biological activity prediction of tyrosine kinase inhibitors

Boosting is one of the most important strategies in ensemble learning because of its ability to improve the stability and performance of weak learners. It is nonparametric, multivariate, fast and interpretable but is not robust against outliers. To enhance its prediction accuracy as well as immunize it against outliers, a modified version of a boosting algorithm (AdaBoost R2) was developed and called AdaBoost R3. In the sampling step, extremum samples were added to the boosting set. In the robustness step, a modified Huber loss function was applied to overcome the outlier problem. In the output step, a deterministic threshold was used to guarantee that bad predictions do not participate in the final output. The performance of the modified algorithm was investigated with two anticancer data sets of tyrosine kinase inhibitors, and the mechanism of inhibition was studied using the relative weighted variable importance procedure. Investigating the effect of base learner's strength reveals that boosting is only successful using the classification and regression tree method (a weak to moderate learner) and does not have a significant effect using the radial basis functions partial least square method (a strong base learners). Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.