The effect of consumption of Agaricus blazei edible mushroom on caspase 2 gene expression in hepatitis C patients using system biology and microarray data

 Agaricus blazei mushroom is used as a food and medicine, its effective composition is beta-glucan, which is used to treat some cancers and infections, including hepatitis C.Hepatitis C is an inflammatory disease that causes liver necrosis. Caspase2 protein is one of the factors promoting cell apoptosis and plays a role in tumor suppression. The purpose of this study is to determine the expression changes of the caspase2 gene and its effects on liver cancer.

 In this project, raw expression data was obtained from the NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) GEO (Gene Expression Omnibus) database section and using bioinformatics tools and methods and system biology such as Matlab (An abbreviation of "MATrix LABoratory), GEOR2 (Online software) and Cytoscape, the effect of consuming the desired mushroom on caspase2 gene expression was investigated.

 It was found that the beta-glucan combination has an increasing effect on target gene expression (p-value=0.05692).

 The results show that the beta-glucan present in the mushroom can play a role as a prevention and even treatment of liver cancer by increasing the expression of caspase 2 protein by directing the damaged cell towards apoptosis.