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Research Paper|Volume 8, Issue 3|pp 521—533

Bacopaside I ameliorates cognitive impairment in APP/PS1 mice via immune-mediated clearance of β-amyloid

Yuanyuan Li1, Xing Yuan1, Yunheng Shen1, Jing Zhao2, Rongcai Yue1, Fang Liu1, Weiwei He3, Rui Wang3, Lei Shan1, Weidong Zhang1,4
  • 1School of Pharmacy, Second Military Medical University, Shanghai 200433, P.R. China
  • 2Department of Mathematics, Logistical Engineering University, Chongqing 401311, China
  • 3School of Pharmacy, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, P.R. China
  • 4Shanghai Institute of Pharmaceutical Industry, Shanghai 200040, P.R. China
# Co-first authors
Received: December 22, 2015Accepted: January 20, 2016Published: March 2, 2016
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.100913

Copyright: © 2016 Li et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Standardized extracts of Bacopa monniera (BME) have been shown to exert a neuroprotective effect against mental diseases, such as depression, anxiety and Alzheimer's disease (AD), in chronic administration studies. However, its mechanism of action has remained unclear. In this study, we evaluated the therapeutic effect of Bacopaside I (BS-I), a major triterpenoid saponin of BME, on the cognitive impairment and neuropathology in APP/PS1 transgenic mice and explored the possible mechanism from a biological systems perspective. We found that BS-I treatment significantly ameliorated learning deficits, improved long-term spatial memory, and reduced plaque load in APP/PS1 mice. We constructed BS-I's therapeutic effect network by mapping the nodes onto the protein-protein interaction (PPI) network constructed according to their functional categories based on genomic and proteomic data. Because many of the top enrichment categories related to the processes of the immune system and phagocytosis were detected, we proposed that BS-I promotes amyloid clearance via the induction of a suitable degree of innate immune stimulation and phagocytosis. Our research may help to clarify the neuroprotective effect of BME and indicated that natural saponins target the immune system, which may offer new research avenues to discover novel treatments for AD.