Effects and mechanism of Kudingcha on obesity

Abstract Obesity is the world's most high-profile public health problem. Kudingcha has been used in traditional medicine because of its antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and weight loss properties. Quercetin and kaempferol are the main components rich in Kudingcha that are effective against obesity. Therefore, we used the method of network pharmacology to study the effects of quercetin and kaempferol to HepG2 cells on obesity. We obtained 20 hub genes through PPI results and the Cytoscape plug-in cytoHubba. The top 10 genes were found eventrully by GO and KEGG enrichment analysis. The results showed that the insulin resistance, PI3K-Akt signaling pathways and adipocytokine signaling pathway might be the central pathways associated with the treatment of obesity by kudingcha. Next, we used Real-Time PCR to detect the expression levels of ISNR, SLc2a4 and APOE genes to study its mechanism. The results showed that compared with the blank group, the expression of ISNR and SLc2a4 increased and the expression of APOE decreased. Our experiments confirmed that Kudingcha contains compounds that can improve insulin resistance and obesity. This can provide a reference for further research and application of Kudingcha in the treatment of obesity.