Assessment and comparison of immunoregulatory activity of four hydrosoluble fractions of Angelica sinensis in vitro on the peritoneal macrophages in ICR mice

Angelica sinensis (Oliv) Diels, a traditional oriental herbal medicine, is known to have immunostimulatory and antitumor effects. In this paper, four hydrosoluble fractions were obtained and purified from A. sinensis including: Angelica polysaccharide, oligosaccharides (Angelica oligosaccharide and Angelica sucrose) and Angelica total amino acid, named APS, AOS, AS, and TM, respectively. Moreover, the immunomodulatory activity of these four fractions on murine peritoneal macrophages were assessed and compared from various aspects including cell proliferation, phagocytic activity, nitric oxide (NO) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) release, induced nitric oxide synthetase (iNOS) and lysozyme (LZM) activity, intracellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1) expression on cell surface and Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) gene expression. Although APS exhibited the most obvious growth facilitative activity, AOS did better in activation of H2O2 release; TM exerted the best activation of phagocytic activity, production of NO and ICAM-1 expression. Furthermore, we found that the action mode of the four fractions was similar to that of LPS and the mechanism may be related to the upregulation of TLR4 mRNA. These results demonstrated that oligosaccharide and amino acid fractions, as well as polysaccharide fraction of Radix A. sinensis, could serve as immunomodulator and TLR4 as one of the immune receptors may play important role for this action. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.