Herbal Medicine Lowers Blood Pressure in Mice While Expanding Gut Microbe Dubosiella

A traditional Chinese medicinal herb, Achyranthes bidentata, significantly lowered blood pressure and eased kidney injury in a mouse model of hypertension, according to a study published in AMB Express. The work, released as an open-access research article on 26 October 2026, links the herb’s anti-hypertensive effect to specific shifts in the gut microbiota and to a remodeling of gut arachidonic acid metabolism, offering what the authors describe as correlative evidence for microbiota-targeted approaches to hypertension therapy.

Treatment with Achyranthes bidentata significantly reduced blood pressure in these animals and ameliorated renal injury. Notably, the treatment did not produce significant changes in circulating inflammatory cytokines or in aldosterone, a hormone central to blood pressure regulation, suggesting the herb’s benefit operates through pathways other than systemic inflammation or aldosterone signaling.

To probe the microbial dimension of the effect, the team performed high-throughput 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing, a method that profiles bacterial communities by reading a conserved genetic marker. The sequencing revealed significant treatment-driven divergence in gut community composition, and this divergence widened over time. Interestingly, alpha diversity, a measure of within-sample microbial variety based on the Shannon, Faith PD, and Observed-feature indices, showed no significant difference after treatment. In other words, the herb reshaped which microbes were present rather than simply increasing overall diversity.

Differential abundance analysis and random-forest modeling, a machine-learning approach for identifying discriminating features, pinpointed two genera as the principal taxa enriched by the treatment: Dubosiella and Lactobacillus. Both were negatively correlated with blood pressure, meaning higher relative abundance was associated with lower readings. The change in Dubosiella was particularly striking: its relative abundance expanded from 0.1 percent to 26.5 percent, a dramatic selective expansion rather than a broad community-wide shift.

Metabolomic profiling added a chemical layer to the story. The treatment remodeled gut arachidonic acid metabolism, with elevated levels of PGE2 p-acetamidophenyl ester observed.

Network analysis tied these threads together, associating Dubosiella abundance with arachidonic acid-related metabolites and with lower blood pressure. Procrustes analysis, a statistical method for testing whether two datasets vary in a coordinated way, confirmed concordance between the microbiota and the metabolome, indicating that the microbial and chemical shifts moved together across samples.

The team also tested the relationship in vitro. Achyranthes bidentata promoted the growth and biofilm formation of Dubosiella newyorkensis DSM103457, a defined bacterial strain, in laboratory culture. This finding supports the idea that the herb acts directly on this microbe, providing a plausible mechanism for the increase in Dubosiella relative abundance seen in the animals.

Taken together, the authors frame Achyranthes bidentata as an anti-hypertensive herbal prebiotic, a plant-derived agent whose effect is associated with selectively feeding beneficial gut bacteria. The study’s evidence is explicitly correlative: the data indicate that the blood pressure reduction accompanies an expansion of Dubosiella and a remodeling of arachidonic acid metabolism, but they do not by themselves establish that these microbial and metabolic changes cause the drop in blood pressure. The findings come from a mouse model, and the authors present them as correlative evidence for microbiota-targeted hypertension therapy rather than proof of a clinical treatment.

Subject of Research: Gut microbiota and metabolite changes associated with the anti-hypertensive effect of Achyranthes bidentata in mice

Article Title: Achyranthes bidentata alleviates hypertension alongside selective expansion of the relative abundance of Dubosiella and remodeling of arachidonic acid metabolism

Article References: Guo, Y., Zhou, X., Lu, Y., Liu, J., Yan, M., Si, W., Wang, K., Yang, M., Liu, J., Sun, H., Chen, X., Wang, X., Li, D., Yang, F., Wu, M., & Yan, D. (2026). Achyranthes bidentata alleviates hypertension alongside selective expansion of the relative abundance of Dubosiella and remodeling of arachidonic acid metabolism. AMB Express. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13568-026-02132-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13568-026-02132-3

Keywords: Achyranthes bidentata, hypertension, gut microbiota, Dubosiella, arachidonic acid metabolism, 16S rRNA sequencing, metabolomics, mouse model, herbal prebiotic, Lactobacillus, blood pressure, AMB Express