Gene Expression Study on Similarity Effect of Thymoquinone on Epithelial Breast Cancer and Colorectal Cancer Cell Lines

Abstract

Abstract:Adenocarcinoma is known as a common type of cancer which includes 85% of breast carcinoma and 95% of colorectal carcinoma. Up until now, the cytotoxic effect of Thymoquinone on different types of tumor cells has been reported. It was hypothesized that Thymoquinone has similar effect on cancer arising from epithelial cells through gene expression analysis in MCF7 breast cancer and HT-29 colon cancer cell lines. The quantity and quality of RNA samples were identified using RNeasyPlus Mini kit and RNA 6000 Nano LabChip kit, respectively. The purified RNA samples of MCF7 cells were used in two-color 8×60K cDNA array platform with SurePrint Agilent technology. The hybridized cRNA/cDNA probes were identified due to labeling with red and green cyanine dyes using GE X hybridization buffer HI-RPM. LOWESS normalization reduced the dye bias on the array slide using feature extraction software. Gene ontology analysis was done after performing different steps of filtering to reduce not satisfied genes using Gene Spring software. Two-step RT-qPCR assay using Taq Man fast advanced master mix analyzed the most up and down regulated genes in MCF7 compared to HT-29 cancer cell lines. The 10 different cancer cell lines in a form of universal reference RNA was used as standard data set comparison and as a positive control RNA in cDNA array and RT-qPCR assay, respectively. The T-test statistical analysis of independent samples showed that there is no significant difference between two types of cell lines due to Thymoquinone treatment with p-value 0.844. Among the selected genes; CARD16, UGT1A8, SLC7A11, IFIT1, IF16 and IFIT3 were expressed significantly (0.009, 0.0001, 0.037, 0.098, 0.0001 and 0.033, respectively) in breast cancer compare to colon cancer cells. The findings indicated similar effect of Thymoquinone on cancer arising from epithelial cells.