Abstract

QUERCETIN ALTERS PRO-INFLAMMATORY CYTOKINE CHANGES IN WILD DENGUE VIRUS CHALLENGED HEPG2 CELL LINE

Moonmoon Sinha, Sanjana Bandyopadhyay, Sulagna Banerjee, Urmita Chakraborty, Arghyadeep Bhattacharjee, Debdatta Nayak, Anil Khurana, Raj Kumar Manchanda, Debabrata Sarkar, Raja Ray, Satadal Das*

Abstract

There is no specific antiviral drug available against the life threatening dengue virus till date. In search of newer antiviral agents which may act on dengue fever we observed that in alternative medicine Eupatorium perfoliatum extract is used frequently to treat dengue fever. We also observed that Quercetin, a plant polyphenolic flavanoid is an important constituent of E. perfoiliatum. Quercetin has been found to possess potent antiviral property against many viral diseases including Flaviviruses; but there is no detailed study of its cytokine modifying activities on dengue virus infected HepG2 cell line. In this study, we explored its effect and role on pro-inflammatory cytokines in HepG2 cells infected with wild virulent dengue viruses of NS1 antigen positive patients’ sera, and compared their regulation with respect to the housekeeping gene Beta-Actin. With quercetin cell aggregates were less, Although there were no statistically significant change of TNF- α and IFN-γ, but there was significant down regulation of IL-1β in quercetin treated virus challenged HepG2 cells.

Keywords: Quercetin, Dengue virus, cytokines.