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Liver fibrosis is a determinant-stage process of many chronic liver diseases and affected over 7.9 billion populations worldwide with increasing demands of ideal therapeutic agents. Discovery of active molecules with anti-hepatic fibrosis efficacies presents the most attacking filed. Here, we revealed that hepatic L-aspartate levels were decreased in CCl4-induced fibrotic mice. Instead, supplementation of L-aspartate orally alleviated typical manifestations of liver injury and fibrosis. These therapeutic efficacies were alongside improvements of mitochondrial adaptive oxidation. Notably, treatment with L-aspartate rebalanced hepatic cholesterol-steroid metabolism and reduced the levels of liver-impairing metabolites, including corticosterone (CORT). Mechanistically, L-aspartate treatment efficiently reversed CORT-mediated glucocorticoid receptor β (GRβ) signaling activation and subsequent transcriptional suppression of the mitochondrial genome by directly binding to the mitochondrial genome. Knockout of GRβ ameliorated corticosterone-mediated mitochondrial dysfunction and hepatocyte damage which also weakened the improvements of L-aspartate in suppressing GRβ signaling. These data suggest that L-aspartate ameliorates hepatic fibrosis by suppressing GRβ signaling via rebalancing cholesterol-steroid metabolism, would be an ideal candidate for clinical liver fibrosis treatment.

A highly efficient and selective carbon–carbon double bonds cleavage of styrene compounds involving molecular oxygen was achieved using TBHP as a free radical initiator in diethylene glycol diethyl ether medium. Various styrene compounds, such as phenyl acrylic acids and its esters, 2-substituted 3-phenyl acrylic acids and its esters, chalcones, 4-phenyl-3-buten-2-one and bis(2-phenylvinyl) ketone, 5-benzylidene-1,3-dimethyl-pyrimidine-2,4,6-triones, could be effectively oxidized into the corresponding aryl carbonyl compounds, and the yield was up to 99%. A suitable mechanism was proposed. Gram-level synthesis further illustrated the practicality of our method.