Abstract:

The objective of this research is to investigate the suppressive effects of lupeol on MCF-7 breast cancer cells, and explore its mechanism on inhibiting the proliferation of MCF-7 cells based on cell metabonomics and cell cycle. Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) was used in the cell metabonomics assay to identify metabolites of MCF-7 cells and MCF-7 cells treated with lupeol. Then, orthogonal partial least squares discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) was used to process the metabolic data and model parameters of OPLS-DA were as follows: R²Ycum=0.988, Q²Ycum=0.964, which indicated that these two groups could be distinguished clearly. The metabolites (VIP (variable importance in the projection)>1) were analyzed by t-test, and finally, metabolites (t<0.05) were identified to be biomarkers. Eleven metabolites such as butanedioic acid, phosphoric acid, L-leucine and isoleucine which had a significant contribution to classification were selected and preliminarily identified due to the accurate mass. Cell cycle assay was analyzed by FACSCalibur. Since the cells in the phase of G1 were increased significantly after the treatment of lupeol, we speculated that lupeol has a blocking effect on the generation of succinyl-CoA and the reaction of substrate phosphorylation of tricarboxylic acid cycle of MCF-7 cells. This study provided a novel approach to the mechanism research on the lupeol treatment on MCF-7 breast cancer cells based on cell metabonomics.

Key words: breast cancer, cell cycle, cell metabonomics, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), inhibition mechanism, lupeol, MCF-7 cells, orthogonal partial least squares discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA)