earticle

영어

In this study, we extracted water soluble polysaccharides from the defatted Korean edible nut cake by boiling for 3 h in water and purified by ethanol precipitation and DEAE-cellulose column chromatography. The monosaccharide composition analysis showed that the purified polysaccharide (NP) is a galacturonoxyloarabinan type polysaccharide consisting of xylose (7.2, molar ratio), arabinose (8.8), and galacturonic acid (4.4) as major sugars and other minor sugars like glucose, galactose, rhamnose, and glucuronic acid. It's molecular mass was shown to be 1,274 kDa by size-exclusion HPLC. Then, we investigated the immunostimulating activity of NP in murine macrophage RAW 264.7 cells. The purified water soluble polysaccharide (NP) did not show any detectable level of cytotoxicity to RAW 264.7 cells in the concentration range tested (10-200 μg/ml) and rather, it promoted the cell proliferation. The NP stimulated the RAW 264.7 cells to produce the nitric oxide (NO) and increase the mRNA expression level of inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS). In addition, it induced the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines (TNF-α and Interleukin-6) and chemokines (RANTES and MIP-1α), which are largely known to play an important role in immune system. Taken together, these results suggest that NP can be considered a potential immunopotentiator and thus can be a potent ingredient of health beneficial functional foods or therapeutic agents.