Affiliations 

  • 1 Medical Parasitology Unit, Department of Medical Microbiology and Parasitology, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang 43400, Selangor, Malaysia
  • 2 Faculty of Medicine and Defence Health, National Defence University of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur 57000, Malaysia
  • 3 Department of Pharmacy, Al Rafidain University College, Al Mustansyria, Baghdad 10052, Iraq
  • 4 Institute of Systems Biology (INBIOSIS), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi 43600, Selangor, Malaysia
  • 5 Natural Medicine and Products Research Laboratory, Institute of Bioscience, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang 43400, Selangor, Malaysia
  • 6 Department of Medical Microbiology and Parasitology, Faculty of Clinical Sciences, Bayero University Kano, Kano 700241, Nigeria
  • 7 Department of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang 43400, Selangor, Malaysia
  • 8 Department of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University Bauchi, Bauchi 740272, Nigeria
  • 9 Pharmacology Unit, Department of Human Anatomy, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang 43400, Selangor, Malaysia
Metabolites, 2021 Jul 28;11(8).
PMID: 34436427 DOI: 10.3390/metabo11080486

Abstract

Andrographolide (AG) has been shown to have several medicinal and pharmaceutical effects, such as antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anti-diabetic, and anti-malarial activities. Moreover, studies to assess the pharmacological effect of AG on the metabolic changes of uninfected red blood cells (uRBCs) have not yet been investigated. This study aims to evaluate the pharmacological effects of AG compared to chloroquine (CQ) on the metabolic variations of uRBCs in vitro using a proton nuclear magnetic resonance (1H-NMR)-based metabolomics approach coupled with multivariate data analysis (MVDA). Forty-one metabolites were successfully identified by 1H-NMR. The results of the unsupervised data analysis principal component analysis (PCA) showed ideal differentiation between AG and CQ. PC1 and PC2 accounted for 71.4% and 17.7% of the explained variation, respectively, with a total variance of 89.10%. Based on S-plot and VIP values, a total of 28 and 32 metabolites were identified as biomarkers in uRBCs-AG and uRBCs-CQ, respectively. In uRBCs treated with AG, ten metabolic pathways were determined to be disturbed, including riboflavin metabolism, d-glutamate and d-glutamine metabolism, phenylalanine metabolism, glutathione metabolism, proline and arginine metabolism, arginine biosynthesis, citrate cycle, glycolysis/gluconeogenesis, and pyruvate metabolism as well as alanine, aspartate, and glutamate metabolism. In contrast, in CQ-treated uRBCs, nine affected metabolic pathways were determined, which involved the same metabolic pathways for uRBCs-AG, except for glutathione metabolism. These findings suggest an evident relationship between AG and CQ associated with metabolic changes in intact RBCs after being exposed to the treatment. The metabolomics results could allow useful comprehensive insights into the underlying mechanism of the action of AG and CQ on red blood cells. Consequently, the 1H-NMR-based metabolomics approach was successfully utilized to identify the pharmacological effects of AG and CQ on the metabolic variations of uRBCs.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.