A basic research for applying the functional food components to reduce the risk of allergic diseases

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In our previous study we found that combinational feeding of beta-carotene and high alpha-tocopherol to BALB/c mice suppressed the production of IgE antibody induced by the specific antigen. To clear the mechanism underlying this suppression, we have carried out several experiments. The production of cytokine in mice that influence the IgE production was investigated in 2004. An experiment of ex vivo antigen-presentation revealed that the production of the antigen inducible IL-12 was augmented in splenocytes from mice fed with beta-carotene and high alpha-tocohperol. Since the effect was lost when BC was replaced with retinylester, the participation' of its redox activity is instead of provitamin-A activity was considered. We found that BC induced the synthesis of glutathione accompanied by the induction of the light chain of gamma-glutamylcysteine synthetase in RAW264, a murine macrophage cultured cell line, while BC oxidizes the cellular membrane in 2005. The synthesis of glutathione led to the cytoplasmic anti-oxidation which influenced the expression of cytokine mRNAs. Although AT inhibited the oxidization of cellular membrane induced by free-radicals, it could not inhibit the oxidization by BC and it affected neither the anti-oxidization of cytoplasm, nor cytokine mRNA production. Based on above results, we intended to clear the mechanism that BC enhances the IL-12 secretion in mice fed with a fixed amount of AT in 2006. As a main result, we found out that intracellular GSH concentration was up-regulated in the splenocytes dose-dependently on BC. There was also a report of correlating the amount of GSH(s) in an antigen presentation cell and IL-12 secretion, together with the above-mentioned research, we conclude that ingestion of BC results in anti-oxidative change in the cytoplasm of the antigen-presenting-cells, which contributes to enhancing IL-12 production suppressing the production of IgE antibody.