The preventive effect of secondary metabolites of Dendrobium officinale on acute alcoholic liver injury in mice

Dendrobium officinale (D. officinale) is a valuable Chinese herbal medicine and rich in chemical components. The current research on the pharmacological active ingredients of D. officinale mainly focus on polysaccharides, however, there are very few studies on the activity of its secondary metabolites. Our study aimed to investigate the potential pharmacological activity of secondary metabolites of D. officinale. Firstly, we determined the polysaccharide content of D. officinale from four different origins and analyzed their secondary metabolites using UPLC Q-TOF/MS. We found that the average polysaccharide content of D. officinale from Anlong, Guizhou was the lowest, and the secondary metabolites were also significantly different from those of Dendrobium from the other three origins. Then, ten differential compounds with high content in D. officinale from Anlong, Guizhou were identified using Orthogonal Projection to Latent analysis (OPLS-DA), and the potential targets of these secondary metabolites associated with acute alcoholic liver injury through network pharmacology. Finally, pharmacodynamic experiments verified that only D. officinale from Anlong significantly improved liver damage in mice with acute alcoholic liver injury, confirming the pharmacodynamic activity of D. officinale secondary metabolites in the prevention of acute alcoholic liver injury. The present study found that the preventive effect of D. officinale on acute alcoholic liver injury in mice was not directly correlated with the polysaccharide content, indicating that the polysaccharide content alone cannot be used as a quality indicator to evaluate the medicinal activity of D. officinale. Our study provides more references for the study of the substance basis of the pharmacological effect of D. officinale, and also provides a research idea and method for the discovery of the pharmacological active ingredients of Chinese medicine.