To examine the active components of bitter gourd extracts
for regulating the blood sugar
Director：Tin-Yun Ho, Associate Professor
graduate student：Yi-Chung Shen
China Medical University, Graduate Institute of Chinese Medical Science
Bitter gourd (Momordica charantia L.) is a commonly known vegetable and is used as a medicinal plant for years. Several science reports indicated could be used for the regulation of blood sugar or for the treatment of diabetes and its complications, such as nephropathy, cataract, and insulin resistance. However, the active components of bitter gourd responsible remained to be identified. Three parts of bitter gourd extracted by water and tested the concentration. To establish normal animail lowing-blood sugar model used by Day’s method. To feed various concentration; of proteins that extracted from bitter gourd to the rat through rat’s mouth.. Then inject glucose solution (4 g/kg) to check the blood sugar change. After two hours the blood sugar low to the bakevalue. It proves that the bitter gourd extracts can regulate the blood sugar. In electrophoresis-plot bitter gourd seed is more deep than others. The functional proteins were isolated by gel filtration and further identified by proteomic approach.. In the plot from MASS-MASS hydrolysis bitter gourd specific peptides, the amino acid series are CDALQEIARand GQEGSQMLQK. From checking the sequences in NCBI protein databas,it has high homophyly with napin proteins.
