Anti-malarial effect of gum arabic

Malaria Journal

Research

Amal Saeed¹  Syed M Qadri²  Diwakar Bobbala²  Daniela Kempe²  Florian Lang²  Michael Föller²  Omaima Nasir²  Adil Ballal³ 

[1] Department of Physiology, University of Khartoum, P.O.Box 102, Elqasr Street, Khartoum, Sudan;Department of Physiology, University of Tübingen, Gmelinstr. 5, D-72076, Tübingen, Germany;Department of Physiology, University of Tübingen, Gmelinstr. 5, D-72076, Tübingen, Germany;Department of Physiology, University of Khartoum, P.O.Box 102, Elqasr Street, Khartoum, Sudan;

关键词: Malaria;    Infected Erythrocyte;    Foetal Haemoglobin;    Plasmodium Berghei;    Haemolytic Uremic Syndrome;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1475-2875-10-139

 received in 2011-02-22, accepted in 2011-05-20,  发布年份 2011

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundGum Arabic (GA), a nonabsorbable nutrient from the exudate of Acacia senegal, exerts a powerful immunomodulatory effect on dendritic cells, antigen-presenting cells involved in the initiation of both innate and adaptive immunity. On the other hand GA degradation delivers short chain fatty acids, which in turn have been shown to foster the expression of foetal haemoglobin in erythrocytes. Increased levels of erythrocyte foetal haemoglobin are known to impede the intraerythrocytic growth of Plasmodium and thus confer some protection against malaria. The present study tested whether gum arabic may influence the clinical course of malaria.MethodsHuman erythrocytes were in vitro infected with Plasmodium falciparum in the absence and presence of butyrate and mice were in vivo infected with Plasmodium berghei ANKA by injecting parasitized murine erythrocytes (1 × 106) intraperitoneally. Half of the mice received gum arabic (10% in drinking water starting 10 days before the day of infection).ResultsAccording to the in vitro experiments butyrate significantly blunted parasitaemia only at concentrations much higher (3 mM) than those encountered in vivo following GA ingestion (<1 μM). According to the in vivo experiments the administration of gum arabic slightly but significantly decreased the parasitaemia and significantly extended the life span of infected mice.DiscussionGA moderately influences the parasitaemia and survival of Plasmodium- infected mice. The underlying mechanism remained, however, elusive.ConclusionsGum arabic favourably influences the course of murine malaria.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Ballal et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.