A research conducted at Lund university is Sweden, with lead researcher Annika S.Axelsson finds that eating broccoli sprouts, which contains compound sulforaphane in abundance may help diabetes patients manage their blood sugar, Type 2 diabetes affects more than 300 million people globally, and as many as 15 per cent of those patients cannot take the first-line therapy metformin because of kidney damage risks.

So in search of a more feasible method to counter the epidemic, the researchers identified compounds that might fight against the disease-associated gene expression changes associated with type 2 diabetes.

The researchers, constructed a signature for type 2 diabetes based on 50 genes, then used data-sets to screen 3,852 compounds for drugs that potentially reverse disease.

The most promising chemical - sulforaphane, a naturally occurring compound found in cruciferous vegetables – significantly brought down glucose production by liver cells growing in culture, and shifted liver gene expression away from a diseased state in experiments conducted using diabetic rats.

The researchers said that developing gene signatures to investigate large public repositories of gene expression data could be a valuable strategy to rapidly identify clinically relevant compounds.

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