Ganoderma lucidum reduces obesity in mice by modulating the composition of the gut microbiota

By Chih-Jung Chang, Chuan‐Sheng Lin, Chia-Chen Lu, Jan Martel, Yun‐Fei Ko, D. Ojcius, Shun-Fu Tseng, Tsung-Ru Wu, Y. M. Chen, John D. Young and 1 more. Nature Communications, 2015

1,116 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Obesity is associated with low-grade chronic inflammation and intestinal dysbiosis. Ganoderma lucidum is a medicinal mushroom used in traditional Chinese medicine with putative anti-diabetic effects. Here, we show that a water extract of Ganoderma lucidum mycelium (WEGL) reduces body weight, inflammation and insulin resistance in mice fed a high-fat diet (HFD). Our data indicate that WEGL not only reverses HFD-induced gut dysbiosis—as indicated by the decreased Firmicutes-to-Bacteroidetes ratios and endotoxin-bearing Proteobacteria levels—but also maintains intestinal barrier integrity and reduces metabolic endotoxemia. The anti-obesity and microbiota-modulating effects are transmissible via horizontal faeces transfer from WEGL-treated mice to HFD-fed mice. We further show that high molecular weight polysaccharides (>300 kDa) isolated from the WEGL extract produce similar anti-obesity and microbiota-modulating effects. Our results indicate that G. lucidum and its high molecular weight polysaccharides may be used as prebiotic agents to prevent gut dysbiosis and obesity-related metabolic disorders in obese individuals. Ganoderma lucidumis a medicinal mushroom used in Traditional Chinese Medicine with putative anti-diabetic properties. Here, the authors show that polysaccharides from a water extract of this mushroom exert beneficial metabolic effects by modulating the composition of the gut microbiota in mice.

Subfields: Molecular Biology, Pharmacology, Rehabilitation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/372df51e78d72f43fcd0decf0971160e269144b8

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In Molecular Biology

1. Run-zhi Zhang
2. Xue Zhu
3. Kang Ning
4. Hong Bai

In Pharmacology

1. Run-zhi Zhang
2. Xue Zhu
3. Kang Ning
4. Hong Bai

Citations in the corpus

• Network Pharmacology Databases for Traditional Chinese Medicine: Review and Assessment (2019, background): “Previous studies have shown that many TCMs can be used as agents to prevent gut dysbiosis (Chang et al., 2015; Zhou et al., 2016).”