Lele Li,Li Ma,Yunlong Guo,Wenlong Liu,Yang Wang,Shuying Liu
Background The reports about valuable oligosaccharides in ginseng are quite limited. There is an urgent need to develop a practical procedure to detect and analyze ginseng oligosaccharides. Methods The oligosaccharide extracts from ginseng were permethylated by solid-phase methylation method and then were analyzed by ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography-Q-Orbitrap/MS. The sequence, linkage, and configuration information of oligosaccharides were determined by using accurate m/z value and tandem mass information. Several standard references were used to further confirm the identification. The oligosaccharide composition in white ginseng and red ginseng was compared using a multivariate statistical analysis method. Results The nonreducing oligosaccharide erlose among 12 oligosaccharides identified was reported for the first time in ginseng. In the comparison of the oligosaccharide extracts from white ginseng and red ginseng, a clear separation was observed in the partial least squares-discriminate analysis score plot, indicating the sugar differences in these two kinds of ginseng samples. The glycans with variable importance in the projection value large than 1.0 were considered to contribute most to the classification. The contents of oligosaccharides in red ginseng were lower than those in white ginseng, and the contents of maltose, maltotriose, maltotetraose, maltopentaose, maltohexaose, maltoheptaose, maltooctaose, maltononaose, sucrose, and erlose decreased significantly ( p < 0.05) in red ginseng. Conclusion A solid-phase methylation method combined with liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry was successfully applied to analyze the oligosaccharides in ginseng extracts, which provides the possibility for holistic evaluation of ginseng oligosaccharides. The comparison of oligosaccharide composition of white ginseng and red ginseng could help understand the differences in pharmacological activities between these two kinds of ginseng samples from the perspective of glycans.
Purpose Aralia taibaiensis, a medicinal food plant, and total saponins from its root bark extract inhibit α-glucosidase activity, which is associated with type 2 diabetes; however, the inhibitory mechanism is unknown. Furthermore, a green extraction technique superior to conventional hot reflux extraction (HRE) is needed for the rapid and easy extraction of A. taibaiensis total saponins (TSAT) to exploit and utilize this resource. Our aim was to develop a green extraction method for obtaining TSAT and to investigate the mechanism by which TSAT inhibits α-glucosidase.Materials and Methods In this study, the ultrasound-assisted extraction (UAE) process was optimized using a Box–Behnken design, and the extraction mechanism was investigated using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was used for qualitative and quantitative analyses of TSAT. In vitro glycosylation assays, enzyme kinetics, fluorescence spectroscopy measurements, atomic force microscopy (AFM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and molecular docking techniques were used to investigate the mechanism by which the A. taibaiensis active ingredients inhibit α-glucosidase.Results The optimal parameters for the extraction yield were obtained as an ethanol concentration of 73%, ultrasound time of 34 min, ultrasound temperature of 61 °C and solid–liquid ratio of 16 g/mL, which were better than HRE. The SEM analysis showed that UAE effectively disrupted plant cells, thus increasing the TSAT yield. In vitro α-glucosidase inhibition experiments showed that both TSAT and its active ingredient, araloside A, inhibited α-glucosidase activity by binding to α-glucosidase, thereby changing the conformation and microenvironment of α-glucosidase to subsequently inhibit enzyme activity.Conclusion The optimal extraction conditions identified here established a basis for future scale-up of ultrasound extraction parameters with the potential for obtaining maximum yields. In vitro enzyme inhibition experiments investigated the mechanism of the TSAT interaction with α-glucosidase and further explored whether araloside A may be the main contributor to the good inhibition of α-glucosidase activity by TSAT.