The Impact Of Moringa Oleifera Lam. On Mice Liver Transcriptome

Obesity is a kind of metabolic disease characterized by abnormal or excessive fat accumulation. Obesity increases risks for various diseases including diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and some types of cancer. Alimentary control and exercising are the main treatments now, but if they are not effective, anti-obesity drugs are performed to reduce body weight, and the effect is significant. However, the side effects of anti-obesity drugs could affect health and may lose their potency over time due to drug resistance. Medicinal plants are now widely used for treating diseases because of significant effects on diseases with less side effects.The Drumstick tree(Moringa oleifera Lam., MO) is a perennial crop that has widely applied to treat a variety of diseases including diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and obesity in traditional Indian medicine. Previous in vitro and in vivo studies showed the hypoglycemia and hypolipidemia effect of MO, which could alleviate glucose tolerance and lipid dysmetabolism induced by obesity or diabetes. However, the studies about treating obesity now mainly focus on the development of effective constituents and symptom alleviation, the impact of MO on obesity-related metabolic processes remained unknown.In this study, we chose the transcriptome method to analyze the effects of MO on the liver metabolic processes related gene expression. We fed mice with diets supplemented by different proportion of MO leaf powders(50% and 100%), and used high-throughput sequencing technology to analyze mice liver RNA transcriptome. After data cleaning, 155.8G data and 1622644530 clean reads were obtained. Using differentially expressed genes analysis, we found that the number of up- and down-regulated genes were 5585 and 7548 in MO groups compared with control group; The expression of 651 genes were up-regulated and 1127 genes were down-regulated in a dose-dependent manner in MO groups compared with control group; The expression of 289 genes were up-regulated and 465 genes were down-regulated in a time-dependent manner in MO groups compared with control group. Using Gene Ontology classification, we found MO could affected four processes: cell part, binding, cellular and metabolic process. Through the KEGG database we analyzed the regulated effects on metabolism pathways, and we found lipid metabolism, carbohydrate metabolism and Vitamins metabolism were significantly regulated by MO. 5 genes were up-regulated(Cyp2a4, Cyp4a14, Ehhadh, Aldh3a2, Acox1) and 1 gene(Cyp2c40) was down-regulated validated by RT-PCR. These results could provide valuable information for researchers to study the impact of MO on liver metabolic processes thus help exploring the molecular mechanism of treating obesity with MO.