Project description:Ganoderma lucidum is a traditional Chinese medicine with a variety of active compounds and possessing adequate lipid-lowering and anti-atherosclerotic effects. However, its main active components and potential mechanisms still remain unclear. Here, we evaluated the anti-hyperlipidemic effect of the adenosine extract from Ganoderma lucidum (AEGL) in high-fat-diet (HFD)-induced hyperlipidemic ApoE-/- mice and explored the underlying biological mechanism by multi-omics analysis. Treatment with AEGL for 8 weeks significantly decreased the serum levels of total cholesterol (TC), triglyceride (TG), and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-c) by 45.59%, 41.22%, and 39.02%, respectively, as well as reduced liver TC and TG by 44.15% and 76.23%, compared with the HFD-only group. We also observed significant amelioration of hepatic steatosis without liver and kidney damage after AEGL treatment. Regulating the expression and acetylation/crotonylation of proteins involved in the PPAR signaling pathway may be one of the potential mechanisms involved in the observed lipid-lowering effects of AEGL.
Project description:Ganoderma lucidum is a traditional medicinal herb that has commonly been used for treating virus infections. Protein LZ-8 comes from Ganoderma lucidum and has immunomodulatory and antiviral activities. However, the potential molecular antiviral mechanism of LZ-8 is still unclear. In this study transcriptome analysis was used to gain a deeper insight into the antiviral effects of LZ-8 on T lymphocytes. Deseq analysis showed that 2724 genes were upregulated and 3314 genes were downregulated after LZ-8 treatment for 5 hours. GO enrichment analysis showed that the upregulated genes were significantly enriched in biological processes including defense response to virus, ribosome biosynthesis, RNA processing, etc. The downregulated genes were significantly enriched in biological processes including cell cycle, signal transduction, etc. Pathway enrichment analysis indicated that NF- κB signaling pathway was closely related to LZ-8. RT-qPCR confirmed that inhibition of the NF-κB signaling pathway reversed the elevated transcriptional level of antiviral genes including Ifit1, Isg15, Mx1, Ifit3, and Ifih1 in T lymphocytes triggered by LZ-8. In a word, our study demonstrated that LZ-8 triggered the antiviral innate immunity of T lymphocytes through the NF-κB signaling pathway.
Project description:As one of the most important environmental factors, heat stress (HS) has been found to affect various biological activities of organisms such as growth, signal transmission, primary metabolism and secondary metabolism. Ganoderma lucidum has become a potential model system for evaluating how environmental factors regulate the secondary metabolism of basidiomycetes. Previous research showed that HS can induce the biosynthesis of ganoderic acids (GAs). In this study, we found the existence of hydrogen sulfide in Ganoderma lucidum; moreover, HS increased GAs biosynthesis and could affect the hydrogen sulfide content. We found that sodium hydrosulfide (NaHS), an exogenous donor of hydrogen sulfide, could revert the increased GAs biosynthesis elicited by HS. This result indicated that an increased content of hydrogen sulfide, within limits, was associated with HS-induced GAs biosynthesis. Our results further showed that the GAs content was increased in CBS-silenced strains and could be reverted to WT strain levels by the addition of NaHS. Transcriptomic analyses indicated that that H2S can affect various intracellular signal pathways and physiological processes in G. lucidum. Further studies showed that H2S could affect the intracellular calcium concentration and thus regulate the biosynthesis of GAs. This study demonstrated that hydrogen sulfide is involved in the regulation of secondary metabolic processes induced by heat stress in filamentous fungi.
