Team:AHUT China/Description

Many foods and medicines can benefit human beings with their significant physiological activity mainly because of APeGs contained in them. APeGs has prominent health functions such as anti-oxidation, anti-aging, and liver and neuro protection. It plays an extremely important role in our health protection.
APeGs is a general term for a category of compounds. It widely exists in many plant ingredients such as broadleaf holly leaf, osmanthus fragrans, olive, etc; in Pharmacopoeia of the People's Republic of China, it also serves as main efficacy component and quality control standard of many traditional Chinese medicines such as cistanche, beautyberry leaf, semen plantaginis, Rehmannia glutinosa Libosch, forsythia, etc.

However, in most foods and medicines, the contents of APeGs are very low and significantly diverse, making APeGs’ quality cannot be guaranteed. We are expecting to find a much more stable and effective way to regulate and control its effective production with the view of getting foods and medicines of better quality.
We have chosen Rehmannia glutinosa Libosch which contains rich APeGs as our study object. We try to regulate and control its metabolic pathway through the key nodes in Rehmannia glutinosa Libosch to study influences on metabolites exerted by different ways of regulation and control.

In order to better conduct our experiments and project, we’ve started with the study on the first key enzyme PAL in the synthetic pathway of APeGs. We transferred the gene RgPAL1 to highly express PAL, and study its influence on APeGs. The result shows that part of APeGs enrichment can be gained by raising PAL. It serves as the first key node in our network of regulation and control pathways, and has laid a good foundation for our later study on the network of metabolic regulation and control.