Summary

Ginseng polysaccharides have attracted research interest for their pharmacological value. In this study, the simplified combination of DEAE cellulose-52 ion-exchange column and ultrafiltration was designed to isolate a novel polysaccharide named GPA-G3-H from ginseng. The main components of GPA-G3-H were determined to be glucose, galacturonic acid, galactose and arabinose. The structure of GPA-G3-H was further comprehensively characterized by zeta potential analysis, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GC–MS). GPA-G3-H existed in the semi-crystalline state, with its backbone predominantly composed of 1,4-Glcp and 1,3,6-Galp. Moreover, GPA-G3-H possessed high content of galactose and uronic acid, uniform molecular size, plentiful negative charge and the highly branched structure. The radical scavenging experiments showed GPA-G3-H had excellent antioxidant activity. In vitro studies further revealed that GPA-G3-H could attenuate insulin resistance by increasing PK and HK activity, suppressing G6Pase and PEPCK activity in IR-HepG2 cells. These findings indicate that GPA-G3-H holds significant promise as both an antioxidant and functional food ingredient.

Information Accepted manuscripts
Accepted manuscripts are PDF versions of the author’s final manuscript, as accepted for publication by the journal but prior to copyediting or typesetting. They can be cited using the author(s), article title, journal title, year of online publication, and DOI. They will be replaced by the final typeset articles, which may therefore contain changes. The DOI will remain the same throughout.
This content is only available as a PDF.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.