Fig. 8.

The effect of pectinase-treated Panax ginseng extract on the testicular mRNA expression level of nectin-2 involved in the sex hormone-related spermatogenesis pathway in young and aged rats. The protocol described in the Materials and methods section 2.4, 2.6 was followed. Total RNA was extracted from 50 mg testes tissue of young and aged rats and was reverse-transcribed for 50 min at 37°C. (A) An aliquot (200 ng) of the reverse-transcribed products was amplified and was separated with electrophoresis on a 2.0% agarose gel containing ethidium bromide. Glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase was used as an internal control. (B) The polymerase chain reaction band intensity of nectin-2 was analyzed using the ImageJ 1.41o software package and was normalized to that of glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase. The data are expressed at the mean ± standard deviation (n = 6). * p < 0.01 compared with the young control rat group. ** p < 0.05 compared with the aged rat control group as determined with Student t-test and one way analysis of variance using GraphPad Prism version 4.0 for Windows. AC, aged rat control group; GAPDH, glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase; GINST, pectinase-treated Panax ginseng extract; GINST-AC, GINST-treated (200 mg/kg body weight) aged rat group; YC, young control rat group.