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Hyocholic acid and glycemic regulation: comments on ‘Hyocholic acid species improve glucose homeostasis through a distinct TGR5 and FXR signaling mechanism
Wei Jia1,2,* , Cynthia Rajani3 , Xiaojiao Zheng1 , Weiping Jia1,*
1Center for Translational Medicine, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Diabetes Mellitus, Department of Endocrinology and Metabolism, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Affiliated Sixth People’s Hospital, Shanghai Diabetes Institute, Shanghai 200233, China
2School of Chinese Medicine, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong SAR, China
3University of Hawaii Cancer Center, Honolulu, HI 96813, USA
*Correspondence to:Wei Jia , Email:weijia1@hkbu.edu.hk Weiping Jia , Email:wpjia@sjtu.edu.cn
J Mol Cell Biol, Volume 13, Issue 6, June 2021, 460-462,  https://doi.org/10.1093/jmcb/mjab027

Hyocholic acid species (HCA, hyodeoxycholic acid, and their glycine and taurine conjugated forms) comprise 80% of the composition of pig bile (Haslewood, 1956). An interesting fact about pigs is that they do not get diabetes even though they eat almost everything and in abundant amounts, a diabetes-promoting diet. The first use of pig bile for treatment of ‘xiao-ke’, a condition known today as diabetes, was recorded ∼400 years ago by the Chinese medical practitioners in the Compendium of Materia Medica (Li, 1573‒1593). Recently, we found HCA species as novel biomarkers for metabolic diseases (Zheng et al., 2021b) and also identified the role of HCA species in the prevention of diabetes as well as their mechanism of action (Zheng et al., 2021a). Although bile acids (BAs) are mostly associated with their aid in food digestion, they have also been shown to act as signaling molecules by binding to two particular receptors, farnesoid X receptor (FXR) and the G-protein-coupled receptor TGR5. Experiments were thus directed to the effect of HCA binding to these two BA receptors on glycemic regulation in both in vivo and in vitro models.