Study Of The Antifibrotic Mechanisms Of Glycyrrhizin

Background and Objective: Hepatic fibrosis is an inevitable course leading to cirrhosis from various chronic liver diseases. The pathological basis of hepatic fibrosis is the imbalance in the production and degradation of extracellular matrix(ECM), which causes the accumulation of ECM in the liver. The main sources of the ECM are the hepatic stellate cell(HSC), especially when HSC are activated by hepatic injury. The central event in liver fibrosis is the activation of HSC. It has been well known that HSC are responsible for the excessive production of ECM. It is rational to choose HSC as a target cell in order to study hepatic fibrosis in our experiment.Glycyrrhizin (GL) is the extract of licorice root and is used as a medicine for various diseases. GL is a conjugate of glycyrrhetinic acid and glucuronic acid. GL has been clinically used in the treatment of liver diseases for its anti-jnjury and anti-viral effects on hepatic diseases for over 20 years. Studies have confirmed that glycyrrhizin have multiple functions to improve hepatic fibrogenesis. Though GL has been shown to be effective in prevention and treatment of liver injury and fibrosis with different mechanism and pathway, the antifibrotic mechanism of cytology and molecular-biology about glycyrrhizin is still uncertain.In order to further investigate the mechanism of cytology and molecular-biology about glycynhizin, the research detects the proliferation effect of glycyrrhizin in HSC by MTT assay. To construct a subtractive cDNAs library of genes differential expressed in rat hepatic stellate cells treated with glycyrrhizin and to screening regulated genes associated...