Polysaccharides from Panax japonicus C.A. Meyer and their antioxidant activities
Introduction
Panax japonicus C.A. Meyer, belongs to Araliaceae Panax family, has a bamboo-like long horizontally creeping rhizome and mainly grows in China, Japan and Korea (Morita et al., 1983). The rhizomes of P. japonicus, named king of herbs in traditional Tujia and Hmong medicine, have been used as a substitute for Ginseng roots in minority ethnic groups (He et al., 2012). It has been included in the Pharmacopeia of the People's Republic of China due to its various pharmacological activities, including anti-obesity, antiulcer, analgesic, expectorant, anti-inflammatory, antifatigue, antioxidant, anticancer and immunoregulation (Han et al., 2005, National Commission of Chinese Pharmacopoeia, 2010, Yamahara et al., 1987). In recent years, saponins in this plant have been widely studied for their chemical properties and biological activities. However, a little attention was devoted to polysaccharides in P. japonicas.
Polysaccharides from natural sources are considered to be effective substances and possess marked immunological properties ranging from nonspecific stimulation of host immune system, resulting in anti-tumor and anti-viral effects, to antioxidant and anti-mutagenic activities (Kennedy, 1989, Sun et al., 2010). Recently, polysaccharide from P. japonius has been reported to possess conspicuous effects on reticuloendothelial system activation (Ohtani, Hatono, Mizutain, Kasai, & Tanaka, 1989). Five polysaccharide samples were separated from Rhizoma panacis japonici by using different methods (Huang & Zhang, 2009). In our previous reports, two polysaccharides, consisted of glucose and galactose were isolated from P. japonius (Wang et al., 2012a).
As is known to all, uncontrolled production of oxygen-derived free radicals as mediators of inflammation and ischemia/reperfusion injury may damage numerous biological substances, including DNA, protein and lipid membranes in living cells (Cuzzocrea et al., 2001, Sahreen et al., 2010), resulting in various diseases and disorders, such as cancer, cardiovascular diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, atherosclerosis and aging (Xu et al., 2009, Wu and Hansen, 2008). Antioxidants can provide protection cells against the damaging effects of reactive oxygen species (ROS) by scavenging free radicals (Zhang, Wang, Han, Zhao, & Yin, 2012). In recent years, there has been increasing interest in finding natural, effective and low cytotoxicity antioxidants because of the carcinogenicity of synthetic antioxidants (Guyton et al., 1991, Kimmel et al., 1986). It has been reported that polysaccharides isolated from plants have certain strong antioxidant abilities on free radicals and should be paid more attention to exploring them as novel potential antioxidants (Capek et al., 2009, Chen et al., 2012, Qi et al., 2006). It is necessary to prepare different molecular weight polysaccharides have great influence on their biological activities (Zhang, Wang, Mo, & Qi, 2013).
The purpose of the present study was to isolate the different molecular weight polysaccharides from the rhizomes of P. japonicus, character their properties and investigate their antioxidant activities using various established in vitro systems.
Section snippets
Materials
The P. japonicus were obtained from Enshi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, China. m-Hydroxydiphenyl was from Acros Orgincs (Geel, Belgium). 2,2′-Azino-bis(3-ethylebenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid) diammonium salt (ABTS), 2,6-di-tert-butyl-4-methylphenol (BHT) and 2,2-diphenyl-1-picryl-hydrazyl (DPPH) were purchased from Sigma Chemical Co. (St. Louis, MO, USA). All of other reagents were of analytical grade.
Preparation of polysaccharides
The powdered material (250 g) was refluxed with 85% EtOH at 70 °C in a water bath for 3
Polysaccharide composition and molecular weight
Polysaccharides were graded by ethanol and obtained 40%, 50%, 60%, 75% and 90% of five kinds of polysaccharides which respectively named PP1, PP2, PP3, PP4 and PP5. The yields of these five samples were 42.2%, 21.6%, 8.7%, 12.3% and 4.9% in removed protein polysaccharide. No proteins existed in the five polysaccharides. The chemical composition and characterizations of all the samples were summarized in Table 1. The table shows that PP1 had the most total sugar content and PP4 had the least in
Conclusions
The researches of natural polysaccharides have attracted a lot of attention because of their abundance in resources and non-toxicity. This article mainly related to the isolation of the antioxidant activities polysaccharides from P. japonicus. According to the results stated above, it could be concluded that we obtained five different Mws polysaccharides. Glucose was the main sugar unit among these five samples. The content of arabinose increased with the increasing of ethanol concentration and
Acknowledgements
This research was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81274023) and Special focus on National Technology Foundation Building Program (No. SB2007FY020) granted from Ministry of Science and Technology of PR China.
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These authors contributed equally to this work.