Characterization of a novel polysaccharide purified from a herb of Cynomorium songaricum Rupr.
Graphical abstract
Introduction
Throughout history of traditional Chinese medicine, many natural products have been widely used as medicines for preventing and treating different types of diseases due to the nature of both food and medicine (Chu et al., 2006, Li et al., 2008; Shi et al., 2011, Li et al., 2014, Avi et al., 2014). Cynomorium songaricum Rupr. (C. songaricum, Cynomoriaceae) is a good example of that. The species C. songaricum, which is a non-photosynthetic plant, found in Mediterranean countries (Rosa et al., 2012), also known as “suo yang” in China, is a wild plant grows in the Gobi desert. As a special plant, the C. songaricum was recorded as early as in China's pre-Qin. It is a perennial herb and known to parasitize the plant roots of Nitraria spp. The roots and inflorescences of C. songaricum are extremely tiny and the rust-colored edible fleshy stems are as rigid as bamboo shoot. It also resembles a male penis, perhaps that is why the C. songaricum is referred to as suo yang in Chinese that has the meaning of “Vigra”. The stem of C. songaricum is generally used to increase sexual capability and to treat lumbar weakness in oriental countries (Cui et al., 2013, Shi et al., 2011; Zhang et al., 2012). It also has been widely used as health food for centuries because of its taste, strong tonic effects and non-toxic (Meng & Ma, 2013; Ma, Sato, Li, Nakamura, & Hattori, 2010).
Undoubtedly, its fine properties are related to the chemical components. A more recent study has shown that numerous chemical ingredients exist that affect multiple pharmacological effects of C. songaricum, including condensed tannins, steroids, triterpenes, butyl fructosides, flavanoids, lignan glycosides, alkaloids, etc. Among them, polysaccharide stands out as an important one because it is safe, replenishable and biodegradable (Ma, Nakamura & Hattor, 2001; Nwokocha & Williams, 2014). Actually, the studies on the C. songaricum polysaccharide have been reported in the last decades and discovered they play special roles, such as anti-diabetes (Wang et al., 2010), anti-aging effects by increasing telomere length of senescence mice (Liu et al., 2011, Meng et al., 2013) and scavenging free radicals. These suggest that the C. songaricum polysaccharide may be well applied to medical health care or fit by the food industry like other active polysaccharide. For example, numerous chemical synthetic antioxidants such as butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA), butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) and propyl gallate (PG) have been used in food products (Karre, Lopez, & Getty, 2013), but they have fallen under scrutiny due to potential toxico-logical effects (Vijayabaskar & Vaseela, 2012). Therefore, attention has been directed toward the isolation of natural antioxidants from botanical sources, and polysaccharide is one. However, the information on the purified C. songaricum polysaccharides of the pharmacological functions and the structure activity relationship is lacking. Most of these researches focus on the crude polysaccharides of the C. songaricum, which contain other ingredients such as proteins and make its composition is too complex to determine the effect of polysaccharides. In addition, it proves that the different fractions from the crude polysaccharide have distinct biological activities (Chi, Chen, Wang, Xiong, & Li, 2008).
For fine polysaccharides from food or herb have been used widely, it is valuable to isolate and characterize the fractions from crude polysaccharide of the C. songaricum. In this study, a polysaccharide named CSP-DS1 was purified from the C. songaricum, and the chemical structure was characterized, as a prelude to establish the structure-activity relationships.
Section snippets
Materials and reagents
The C. songaricum was obtained from yellow river medicine market, Lanzhou, Gansu province, China (Dry fleshy stem, identified by Dr. Yifeng Wang, professor of botany at northwest normal university). DEAE-52 Cellulose and Sepharose CL-6B were purchased from Solarbio Co., Ltd., Beijing, China. Papain was obtained from Sigma–Aldrich, Shanghai, China. All kinds of pure monosaccharide standards (l-ribose (Amr), l-rhamnose (Rha), d-lyxose (Lyx), d-arabinose (Ara), d-xylose (Xyl), d-mannose (Man), d
Basic properties of the CSP-DS1
The CSP was isolated from the hot-water extract of C. songaricum with a yield of 9.1%, and separated on a DEAE-52 cellulose column. Two main fractions were obtained, the water elute fraction and the NaOH elute fraction, named CSP-D1 and CSP-D2, respectively (Fig. 2a). The CSP-D1 was further purified on Sepharose CL-6B column, and obtained a main fraction, with a yield of 0.03% and named CSP-DS1 (Fig. 2b), the result indicates that only one symmetrical peak on chromatography. Likewise, it has no
Conclusions
A novel polysaccharide, named CSP-DS1, was separated and purified from C. songaricum, by DEAE-52 column chromatography and a Sepharose CL-6B column chromatography. The molecular weight of the CSP-DS1 is about 48.1 × 104 Da. Monosaccharide analysis reveals that the CSP-DS1 is a heteropolysaccharide composed of Man, Glc and Gal residues in mole ratio of 5.01: 89.17: 5.82. Based on the analysis of methylation, IR, 1D and 2D NMR, the backbone structure of the CSP-DS1 is assigned as:
Acknowledgments
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51273162) and the National Key Technology R&D Program (2012BAD36B04).
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