Background: Bufalin is a major active compound of cinobufacini, which comes from dried toad venom and has been used for treatments of various cancers in China for many years. A number of studies have demonstrated that bufalin can induce apoptosis in some cancers. However, effects and mechanism of bufalin on prostate cancer cells remain unknown.Methods: Apoptosis assay was measured by the annexin-V/PI flow cytometric assay. Western blot was used to measure Caspase-3 and Bcl-2. qRT-PCR was used to measure the relative expression of miR-181a.Results: Bufalin was found to induce the expression of miR-181a, a small non-coding RNA believed to induce apoptosis by repressing its target gene, BCL-2. In prostate cancer PC-3cell line, bufalin-induced apoptosis can be largely attenuated by a miR-181a inhibitor, which blocked bufalin-induced Bcl-2 reduction and caspase-3 activation.Conclusions: Our dataindicatedthat miR-181a mediates bufalin-induced apoptosis in PC-3 cells. Thus, we presented here a new pharmacological mechanism for bufalin in anti-tumor therapy. © 2013 Zhai et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
CITATION STYLE
Zhai, X. feng, Fang, F. fu, Liu, Q., Meng, Y. bin, Guo, Y. yu, & Chen, Z. (2013). MiR-181a contributes to bufalin-induced apoptosis in PC-3 prostate cancer cells. BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 13. https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6882-13-325
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