Publications by authors named "Emanuele Liborio Citriniti"

Obesity remains a significant global health concern, with limited pharmacological options that balance efficacy and safety. In this study, we identified lithospermic acid (LTS0059529) from Salvia miltiorrhiza as a potential dual inhibitor of pancreatic lipase (PL) and human carbonic anhydrase VA (hCA VA), two key enzymes in lipid metabolism. Using molecular docking and dynamics simulations, we observed that lithospermic acid interacts with Zn²⁺ in hCA VA via its benzofuran carboxylate moiety and forms stable complexes with PL through hydrogen bonding with ASP 205 and π-stacking interactions with PHE 77 and PHE 215.

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Obesity is a global health crisis linked to chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. Its prevalence, even in low-income countries, highlights the failure of traditional interventions. Safer pharmacological treatments are urgently needed, as many existing antiobesity drugs have been withdrawn due to severe side effects, leaving a critical therapeutic gap.

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G-quadruplexes (G4s) are distinctive four-stranded nucleic acid structures formed by guanine-rich sequences, making them attractive targets for drug repurposing efforts. Modulating their stability and function holds promise for treating diseases like cancer. To identify potential drug candidates capable of interacting with these complex DNA formations, docking studies and molecular dynamics (MDs) simulations were conducted.

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Resveratrol (RSV) is a nutraceutical compound belonging to the nonflavonoid polyphenol family, whose antioxidants, anti-inflammatory, and antitumoral properties have been widely investigated. The ability of RSV to provide beneficial effects for neurological, cardiovascular, and cancer disorders rekindled the interest to explore the molecular mechanisms behind its pleiotropic effects, which are due to the modulation of coding and noncoding genes involved in many key biological pathways. With a computational approach, including docking studies and thermodynamics calculations followed by 200-ns-long molecular dynamics and a clustering analysis, we hypothesized the stabilizing binding between RSV and G4 structures of telomeric repeat-containing RNA (TERRA), which is a tumor-suppressive long noncoding RNAs (lncRNA) involved in the regulation of telomere maintenance.

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The growing information currently available on the central role of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) including microRNAs (miRNAS) and long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) for chronic and degenerative human diseases makes them attractive therapeutic targets. RNAs carry out different functional roles in human biology and are deeply deregulated in several diseases. So far, different attempts to therapeutically target the 3D RNA structures with small molecules have been reported.

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