Effect of Artemisia herba alba essential oil on the expression of ADA and ODC1 genes in human breast cancer cells MCF-7

In this study, the effect of Artemisia herba alba essential oil on the survival rate and expression of ODC1 and ADA genes in human breast cancer cell line MCF-7 was studied.

The essential oil (EO) of A. herba alba was extracted by Clevenger. Essential oil composition is analyzed by GC-Mass. MCF-7 cell line was treated by increasing concentrations of EO from 0.01 to 0.03 µg/ml. Then cytotoxicity of EO was investigated by MTT assay and the expression of ODC1 and ADA genes were measured by the Real-time PCR method.

Most essential oils included Camphor, Chrysanthenyl Acetate,  and Davanone. Results showed that by increasing the EO concentration, the cytotoxicity was significantly increased and the calculated IC50 for 24, 48, and 72 h were 0.02104, 0.01858, 0.011751 µg/ml. Moreover, at the concentration of 0.02 µg/ml of EO the expression of the ODC1 and ADA gene decreased by 2 and 1.2-fold against the control, respectively.

The cytotoxicity of A. herba alba EO, which was observed in this study, seems to be the result of decreased expression of ODC1 and ADA genes in the MCF-7 breast cancer cell line.