Integrated in vitro, in silico, and in vivo approaches to elucidate the antidiabetic mechanisms of Cicer arietinum and Hordeum vulgare extract and secondary metabolites

作者：Asif Shahzad, Wenjing Liu, Shoukat Hussain, Yueli Ni, Kun Cui, Yijian Sun, Xiangjie Liu, Qiuxin Duan, Jiaojiao Xia, Jinshan Zhang, Zhe Xu, Buqing Sai, Yuechun Zhu, Qiao Zhang, Zhe Yang · 发表于：Scientific Reports · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1038/s41598-025-89642-5 · 被引用次数：20 · 研究领域：Genetic and Environmental Crop Studies、Botanical Research and Chemistry、Seed and Plant Biochemistry

Diabetes mellitus is a group of metabolic disorders that can lead to severe health problems, and the current treatments often have harmful side effects. Therefore, there is a growing interest in discovering new antidiabetic drugs with fewer adverse effects, and natural products are a promising source for this purpose. Cicer arietinum and Hordeum vulgare are plants with high levels of phytochemicals that have been shown to have therapeutic properties. This study investigates the anti-diabetic potential of C. arietinum and H. vulgare seeds and their secondary metabolites. We employed a comprehensive approach combining in vitro, in silico, and in vivo methods to evaluate the efficacy of the compounds. Our findings reveal that the extracts of C. arietinum (IC50 55.08 μg/mL) and H. vulgare (IC50 115.8 ± 5 μg/mL) demonstrated a stronger inhibitory effect on α-amylase compared to acarbose (standard drug) (IC50 196.3 ± 10 μg/mL). Similarly, both C. arietinum and H. vulgare exhibited significant inhibitory activity against α-glucosidase (IC50 100.2 ± 5 μg/mL and IC50 216.2 ± 5 μg/mL, respectively) compared to acarbose (IC50 246.5 ± 10 μg/mL). To further investigate their mechanism of action, a computational screening of 194 phytochemicals from these plants was conducted, followed by molecular docking with α-amylase (PDB ID#1B2Y) and α-Glucosidase (PDB ID# 5NN8) receptors. According to the binding affinities and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, Medicag...