Effects of Magnolia officinalis compatibility with Polygala tenuifolia on mitochondrial metabolism in rats’ liver based on bio-thermodynamics

Abstract

Polygala tenuifolia (Yuanzhi in Chinese) has gastrointestinal toxicity which can be significantly alleviated by Magnolia officinalis (Houpo in Chinese) due to the heat production of mitochondria based on our previous study. In this paper, we have compared the different effects of M. officinalis, P. tenuifolia and their compatibility group on the mitochondrial metabolism in rats liver based on bio-thermodynamics. According to the growth thermogenic curves, we could obtain the exponential growth parameters to reflect the effect of reduced toxicity affected by M. officinalis. We also compared the further functional characteristics of M. officinalis, P. tenuifolia and their compatibility by means of statistical methods. The different experiment concentrations on mitochondrial metabolism were analyzed by principle component analysis (PCA). By analyzing the effect of different experiment concentrations on mitochondrial growth rate, we found that the metabolism rate K of mitochondria in P. tenuifolia group reduced in doses dependently. We obtained the exponential growth constant K and depicted the metabolism thermal power-time curve information of mitochondria at the same time. Our results showed that with the increased concentration of P. tenuifolia extracts, there was significant promotion of heat production by mitochondria while inhibition of M. officinalis extracts and their compatibility extracts. Analyzed by PCA, M. officinalis group distributed more scattered and had far influence on mitochondrial metabolism when compared to M. officinalis group and their compatibility group. It showed that P. tenuifolia’s gastrointestinal side effect was related to the change of mitochondrial energy metabolism.