On April 6th, the latest achievement of the research group led by Prof. Zhang Xiaokun from School of Pharmaceutical Sciences was published on Molecular Cell, a companion to Cell, the world-leading academic journal. The paper unveils a potential treatment of obesity by discovering the major targets of Celastrol, a chemical extracted from a traditional Chinese herb named tripterygium wilfordii, and its mechanism to regulate metabolism.

      Apart from Prof. Zhang Xiaokun, other first authors of the paper are Hu Mengjie and Gulimiran Ali, doctoral students from School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Luo Qiang from the Research Laboratory of the Third Institute of Oceanography, State Oceanic Administration. The research is sponsored by National Natural Science Foundation of China and South Oceanographic Research Center in Xiamen. And the title of the paper is “Celastrol-induced Nur77 interaction with TRAF2 alleviates inflammation by promoting mitochondrial ubiquitination and autophagy”.