Obesity is a chronic metabolic disease characterized by excessive body fat. Over 100 million adults in the US are considered obese, making it a significant metabolic disorder that is a risk factor for multiple metabolic diseases, including diabetes mellitus (DM), cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, dyslipidemia, renal and neurological dysfunctions, etc. There are a limited number of drugs available for the treatment of obesity. Lipase is one of the enzymes that plays a key role in lipid digestion and can be a target to treat weight gain and associated dyslipidemia and DM. However, there are continuous searches for new therapies, especially for traditional plant-based medicines due to the side effects associated with the currently available therapies. Metformin and statins are a couple of recent success stories of herbal and/or traditional medicine. Camellia sinensis (CS) is a species of evergreen shrub shown to have antioxidant and metabolic health benefits. Traditional medicine reports indicate its role in bodyweight loss. Since excess fat can lead to an increase in insulin resistance, lowering the excess fat by treating obesity can also slow the progression of DM. Our current study details an in-silico evaluation of phytochemicals of CS for lipase inhibitory activity to prevent fat absorption. Lipase is an enzyme that helps digest fat. By inhibiting lipase, the calories that would come from breaking down the fat will not be stored in the body and will also lead to decreased lipogenesis. This would lead to a decrease in excess fat and reduce obesity, subsequently helping with weight loss, dyslipidemia, and DM. We identified 23 known phytochemicals from CS, and the structures were obtained from the PubChem database. OpenBabel was used to convert the 2D structures of the phytochemicals to 3D structures, and the lipase protein structure was retrieved from the RCSB Protein Data Bank. The CB-Dock2 tool was used for the molecular docking of phytochemicals with the protein Lipase. The docking was then visualized in ChimeraX 1.9. Binding affinities were determined using VINA scores and docking cavity areas. Hydrogen bonding, other interactions (hydrophobic and ionic), and the size of the binding surface area were analyzed to find the potentially strong binding phytochemical candidates. Our study finds that several Camellia sinensis phytochemicals (CS3, CS9 and CS15) bind strongly to the lipase enzyme at the active binding/catalytic site. Thus, Camellia sinensis phytochemicals are suggested to be a potential new candidate for lipase inhibition activity in the management of obesity and subsequent regulation of DM. This abstract was presented at the American Physiology Summit 2026 and is only available in HTML format. There is no downloadable file or PDF version. The Physiology editorial board was not involved in the peer review process.
Chinta et al. (Fri,) studied this question.