Efficacy of Poria cocos and Alismatis rhizoma against diet-induced hyperlipidemia in rats based on transcriptome...

Hyperlipidemia, a common metabolic disease, is a risk factor for cardiovascular diseases, Poria cocos (PC) and Alismatis rhizoma (AR) serve as a potential treatment. A systematic approach based on transcriptome sequencing analysis and bioinformatics methods was developed to explore the synergistic effects of PC-AR and identify major compounds and potential targets. The phenotypic characteristics results indicated that the high dose (4.54 g/kg) of PC-AR reduced total cholesterol (TC), elevated high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) levels, and improved hepatocyte morphology, as assessed via hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining. Transcriptomic profiling processing results combined with GO enrichment analysis to identify the overlapping genes were associated with inflammatory responses. The cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction pathway was found as a potential key pathway using geneset enrichment analysis. Core enrichment targets were selected according to the PC-AR's fold change versus the model. Real-time quantitative PCR analysis validated that PC-AR significantly downregulated the expression of Cxcl10, Ccl2, Ccl4, Cd40 and Il-1β mRNA (P < 0.05). Molecular docking analysis revealed the significant compounds of PC-AR and the potential binding patterns of the critical compounds and targets. This study provides further evidence that the therapeutic effects of PC-AR on hyperlipidemia in rats through the regulation of inflammation-related targets.