ABSTRACT American ginseng ( Panax quinquefolium L.) is a traditional Chinese medicinal herb that has been used in China for hundreds of years. The significant hypoglycemic activity of American ginseng has made it widely used in health food as a valuable medicinal herb with homologous origin. However, its effect and mechanism of improving insulin resistance (IR) remain unclear. In the present study, an IR‐HepG2 cells model induced by high concentrations of insulin was constructed and treated with ethanol extract of dried American ginseng (EDAG) at different concentrations to reveal the in vitro ameliorative effect of EDAG on IR by monitoring glucose consumption, glycogen content, triglyceride (TG) content, and total cholesterol (TC) content of the cells. The cell metabolite changes were tracked by liquid chromatography‐mass spectrometry (LC‐MS)‐based metabolomics combined with multivariate statistical analysis, the metabolic biomarkers and related metabolic pathways were analyzed, and further elucidate its mechanism of action. The results showed that treatment with EDAG increased glucose consumption and glycogen content, and decreased intracellular TC and TG content in IR‐HepG2 cells to different degrees. The results of cell metabolomics indicated that EDAG treatment reversed metabolic disorders by regulating sphingolipid metabolism, linoleic acid metabolism, and arginine and proline metabolism, etc. The present study explored the in vitro IR improvement mechanism of EDAG based on the LC‐MS cell metabolomics approach, which confirms the great potential of LC‐MS technology in the evaluation of drug efficacy and can be an effective tool for the related analysis of other Chinese herbal medicines.
Jing et al. (Sun,) studied this question.