Abstract
Astragalus polysaccharide (AP) is the extraction of astragalus, which is a plant used in traditional Chinese herb medicine and may increase an orgainism’s resistance to stress. Several earlier studies in vitro have indicated that AP has anti-aging activities, however the mechanism underlyling these activities was unclear and remained to be elucidated. In this study, Using the zebrafish (Danio rerio), we evaluated molecular mechanism of the effect of AP on zebrafish growth, development and apoptosis. 30 zebrafish embryos (24 hours post fertilization (hpf)) were exposed to varying concentrations of AP (from 0.125 mg/ml to 0. 5 mg/ml) continuously for 3 days. The results of β-galactosidase (SA-β-gal) and acridine orange fluorescence showed that AP can delay zebrafish embryos apoptosis under the concentration of 0.125 mg/ml. In addition, the differential gene expression of AP treated zebrafish embryos was examined by RT-PCR analysis. We found that the gene expression of mdm2 and tert were up-regulated while bax, p21 and p53 gene expression were down-regulated during early apoptosis of the zebrafish embryos mediated by AP. These results demonstrated that AP may play a role during the induction of senescence and this function might by p53-mediated pathway.
Highlights
Chronic oxidative stress has been shown to reduce lifespan in many sopecies and lead to accelerated aging [13]
After following a series concentration of Astragalus polysaccharide (AP) treatment, we found that if the concentration higher than 0.5 mg/ml, almost all the embryos were dead, and there is almost no difference among the lower concentration (0.025 mg/ml, 0.05 mg/ml, 0.75 mg/ml and 1.0 mg/ml, data not show), so in our experiment we choose three different concentration of AP, and the results indicate that the growth and development of zebrafish were inhibited at the concentration of 0.5 mg/ml (Figure 1)
AP has a variety of biological activities and pharmacological functions and play an important role in preventing and treating various chronic diseases, such as diabetes, hyperlipidemia, cancer, heaptitis, hypo-immunity function and thromobosis [36]
Summary
Chronic oxidative stress has been shown to reduce lifespan in many sopecies and lead to accelerated aging [13]. On cell level there are two kinds of senescence, replicative senescence and premature senescence (SIPS), different types of intrinsic and extrinsic stress signals are likely to converge on the activation of the p53 protein, the Rb protein, or both. In this manner, these two key tumor suppressor proteins might act as integrators of stress signals, and their combined level of activation would determine the onset of senescence [5,6,7,8]
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