Bowels on Berberine

Persistent diarrhoea. Abdominal pain. Fatigue. These are all the unpleasant symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The current drug treatment only has a 40% success rate, which is why clinical trials are underway to test new drugs, including the plant product berberine. Berberine has shown promising results in treating IBD. Researchers now investigate how it works in a mouse model of IBD. The large intestines of healthy and IBD mice, with or without berberine treatment, were imaged using fluorescence microscopy (pictured). This revealed that berberine reduced the activity of immune cells that promote inflammation and increased intestinal stem cell numbers (red) in healthy (top, right) and IBD mice (bottom, right) when compared with untreated mice (left). In IBD mice, this encouraged the repair of damaged intestinal tissue. Further investigation revealed that berberine works by activating a signalling pathway called Wnt, as blocking this pathway reduced its therapeutic effects.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image adapted from work by Zecheng Luo, Zihao Li, and Zheng Liang, and colleagues
• Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Chengdu and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in BMC Biology, December 2022