Asparagus Polysaccharide On Its Biological Activity

Asparagus officinalis is recog nized as a traditional medical plant for its broadpharmacological activities. There are some chemical components in Asparagus officinaliswhich has many function of anti-tumour, reduce blood fat, immunization, fight againstsenium, anti-fatigue and so on.In this paper we isolate polysaccharide from fresh Asparagus officinalis by means ofhot-water extracting. Then the function of anti-tumour, NO production, antioxidant and itschemical character were investigated. The main conclusions are as followed.The microculture tetrazolium(MTT) assay was used to determine the cytotoxicity ofcancer cell (BGC823) by polysaccharide. The results indicate that the polysaccharide hasanti-tumour activity on the tumour cells(BGC823) by inhibiting growth of tumour cells.The inhibitory index is 45.5% when the polysaccharide concentration is 300μg/ml.By adding different concentration of polysaccharide into cultured mice peritonealmacrophage in vitro, the influence of polysaccharide on the synthesis of nitrogen oxide(NO)was observed by Griess method. The results indicated that polysaccharide couldsignificantly increase NO synthesis of mice peritoneal macrophage after 48h in vitrocultured with polysaccharide, and was in a dose-dependent.We choosed spectrophotometer method to study the polysaccharide of Asparagusofficinalis on reactive oxidative free radical. In vitro, it was shown that the polysaccharidewere found to have significant capacity of scavenging free radical in a concentration ofdose-dependant manner. The scavenging effects on hydroxyl free radical and superoxideanion free radical by polysaccharide with the concentration of 2.5mg/ml were equal to theconcentration of 22mg/ml of manna. In addition, a significant inhibition ofmalondialdehyde(MDA) generation spontaneously in liver homogenate is also oberservedin vitro.All above results will provide some reference for making more exploitation onAsparagus officinalis.