Biologically active phytochemicals from pumpkin reveal versatile medical applications, though little is known about their antiviral activity. The fucose-rich polysaccharide extraction conditions were optimized through Box-Behnken design and purified by column chromatography. The purified fucose-rich polysaccharide was characterized through SEM, FT-IR, 1H NMR, XRD, TGA, and GS-MS. The analysis results revealed an irregular and porous surface of the purified polysaccharide with high fucose, rhamnose, galactose, and glucose contents. The tested fucose-rich polysaccharides revealed significant antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activity at very low concentrations. The purified fucose-rich polysaccharides exerted a broad-spectrum antiviral activity against both DNA and RNA viruses, accompanied by high safety toward normal cells, where the maximum safe doses (EC100) were estimated to be about 3-3.9 mg/mL for both Vero and PBMC cell lines. Treatment of HCV, ADV7, HSV1, and HIV viruses with the purified polysaccharides showed a potent dose-dependent inhibitory activity with IC50 values of 95.475, 20.96, 5.213, and 461.75 μg/mL, respectively. This activity was hypothesized to be through inhibiting the viral entry in HCV infection and inhibiting the reverse transcriptase activity in HIV. The current study firstly reported the antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and antiviral activities of Cucurbita maxima fucose-rich polysaccharide against several viral infections.
Keywords: Adenovirus; Antiviral; HCV; HIV; HSV-1; Pumpkin fucose-rich polysaccharides; Response surface.
Copyright © 2023. Published by Elsevier B.V.