Use of molecular biology for studying the mode of action of some medicinal plant extracts as anticancer agents / Abeer Sayed Kandil Ibrahim ; Supervised Hany Abdelaziz Elshemy , Faten Mohamed Abouelella

Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Agriculture - Department of Agricultural Biochemistry

Medicinal plants have been used in folk medicine for thousands of years as natural products which play a role in pharmaceutical biology. Therefore, highlighting of the antioxidant and anticancer activities of Aloe vera, Sonchus oleraceus, Morus alba and Cichorium intybus were the aim of this study. Total phenol and flavonoid content were calculated. Antioxidant activity was determined by DPPH and reducing power using different concentrations. The highest effect for antioxidant activity were estimated for Morus alba. The anticancer activity for cancer cell lines was evaluated by MTT assay in MCF-7 breast cancer cell and AML leukemia cancer cells. The ethyl acetate extract of M. alba possessed the anticancer activity 78.77% at 250 æg/ml against AML cells. The methanolic extract of C. intybus had high effect against MCF-7cell line which was 88.38% at 750 æg/ml, while methanolic extract of M. alba recorded 68.68% at 250 æg/ml. Three bioactive fractions were isolated from ethanolic extract of C. intybus using TLC (F1-F3). Pure fraction F1 had the highest anticancer activity against breast cancer cells (94.18 ±3.93 %) at 40 æg/ml and F3 gave 62.37±0.66% at 60æg/ml. The expression of related apoptosis genes Bax{u2013}BCL-XL was determined. The data showed that the expression of BAX was increased from 1to 2.62 and 1to 1.63 in breast cancer cells after treatment with C. intybus and M. alba extracts respectively while the expression of BCL-XL was decreased after treatment by both extracts.The data showed that the expression of CEBPA increased in AML cells after treatment by methanolic extracts of C. intybus and M. alba but with no significant difference between the two extracts

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